In an exclusive interview with Mid-day.com, the filmmaker tells us what he loves about social media, and how he is hoping to ‘shake things up’ with Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2.
Dibakar Banerjee
Fourteen years after Love Sex Aur Dhokha shook up a storm in filmdom, Dibakar Banerjee is back with its spirit sequel, which is out in theatres today. Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 explores life in the times of social media, and Dibakar’s objective gaze on it, since he himself doesn’t participate in it. In an exclusive interview with Mid-day.com, the filmmaker tells us what he loves about social media, and how he is hoping to ‘shake things up’ with Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2.
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You're not on social media, but you have made a film on the social media obsession of the current times. How does that work?
I think that works best, because if I'm not on social media, but if I am actually crawling and snooping on social media, then I'll be kind of an objective viewer. I'm not participating in it, but that objectivity kind of helps if you're not associated, in terms of your own personal stakes. If you're not personally influenced by it. Then it becomes easier to be objective and make a film about it without the treatment becoming problematic, where your own gaze is actually a problem.
What do you love and hate about social media?
I love everything. I love the fact that people have the freedom to live many versions of their lives on social media. People have the freedom to reinvent or invent new versions of themselves on social media. And that's what LSD2 is about. It's about our versions. It's about our avatars. It's about our multiple lives. My film shows a janitor - lowest of the low - who is transgender, who's working as a metro station loo cleaner. But she also runs a love advisory YouTube channel called Pyar Ke Panchi. So it's about our lives, our fantasy lives, which are now becoming real because we are doing it in the virtual space. I don't find anything problematic in it. It's another sphere of life.
So, is everything that you're showing, with respect to social media in LSD2, positive?
No, no, it's very scary. I'm hoping to shake people up because I think, when we are in a space where we are trying to escape our physical lives, and then we are actually investing so much in our virtual lives, then what happens is that the distance between our virtual and the real life becomes huge. And since we still haven't - like Matrix - gotten free of our physical lives, there is a disconnect. So that's what the film is about. It's also about what fun situations emerge from this.
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What do you think about this whole influencer culture?
You know, one possible name for LSD2 was 'The Influence'. Because it is about the influence. It's about us being influenced. It's about us influencing. It's about how many followers do we have, how many people do we follow. So it's about people chasing people and people running around in circles. I love it.
What are the challenges of making fiction look like reality?
Well, the first thing is that nobody wants to look at reality. You might not have a hundred crore film on your hand, so you have to make it on a very tight budget. At the same time, the reality that I'm trying to show about LSD2 is the life of virtual reality. So we've had to jump into sequences created by AI, deep fake and animation, and not shot by a camera. We've actually built a metaverse for our film. Our climax is that all our characters are in the metaverse. They're in the virtual avatars. We created a game for our film, because one of the protagonists is a gaming influencer.
Why didn't you cast a trans person as Noor, instead of a straight actor, Paritosh?
We had two transgender characters and we were very sure that we will have a transgender actor for Kulu's role. And we were looking at transgender actors for Noor's role also, but that's when we realized that if we have two transgender actors in one film, and if it's a theatrical release, then it's going to be a niche film. I said that, look, I'm not going to take a cisgender actress and make her act like a transgender, it's best to speak to men and figure out male actors and see how they feel about it. That's how Paritosh was cast as Noor. But our biggest success has been that there are quite a few transgender women in our film acting as cisgender women, which nobody will be able to tell.
Why not release it on OTT? It probably would have given you more liberties…
That's totally Ekta (Kapoor, producer). Ekta wanted this film to be a theatrical. She knew she was taking a huge risk. Ekta knows that she's put her reputation, her money on the line. She has a very special place for LSD, the franchise, in her heart. And when it came out in 2010, it set off new things for Ekta, it gave a new direction. I think Ekta is somebody who's always looking for a new direction and some kind of a provocation. And she knew that I'm the kind of filmmaker who will just jump at something like this. But it was she who dangled the bait of LSD2 as a theatrical film. It is she who's the most vulnerable in this scheme, who's had to pull out rabbits after rabbits in terms of plans and schemes out of her hat to make this film financially viable.
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