Too much money fuels vanity van madness, say Siddharth-Garima | Exclusive

Corporate cash influx sparked actors' demands for 6-7 vanity vans, but Siddharth-Garima prefers staying frugal, as it helps maintain the authenticity of the project. In Pune, they praised tight budgets for better control, vowing to stay lean even with stars.

Q. There’s talk of actors demanding multiple vanities—up to six or seven—and Aamir Khan recently criticised this trend. Why do you think this has become so common?

Siddharth: It started with the corporates entering the movie business. There was too much money when the entire film industry got corporate rights, and everybody started paying for everything. If you start doing that, then you cannot crib about it 10 years down the line. It was them who started this practice, they wanted their stars to have everything, so why back out now that your budgets are inflating.Garima: We recently met Javed (Akhtar) saab, and he told us a beautiful thing.

We asked him, ‘Why do you think this industry is going in the direction it is?’ He replied, ‘paisa bahut hai.’ That’s the problem of too much money. Sometimes a film doesn’t need that much money, but you are anyway spending billions on it because they think they are making a magnum opus, the stars should get what they want, the world should know there are 36 vanities on my set.

But when you have limited money and even a smaller window of budget inflation, then you make a film that is rich in the sense of a movie. We made Dukaan as our first film as a director, we did not exceed a single day of shooting. Our total budget was not even two figures (crores). Saale Aashiq was a little higher in budget, and we want to stick to these budgets because we feel the tighter you are, the better controlled everything is. Tomorrow, even if we work with stars, we will tell them that we are frugal filmmakers, and this is how we intend to wrap things up.Siddharth: Whatever a producer is spending on a film should be seen on the screen. Nobody will get to see a vanity, only for the sake of making friends in the industry, so a particular actor will only work with you.