Tag: Yash Chopra

 

By A Correspondent

 

There’s been a lot written on Yash Chopra already. Accounts chronicling his life and work. He was undoubtedly India’s biggest film-maker. And one of most respected ones too. King of Romance. Numero uno… one of the finest.

 

From the time he got into films assisting the maverick film-maker I S  Johar and his brother B R Chopra (who passed away some years back), to directing films for his brother (including the trendsetter Waqt) to giving us such megahits like Deewar and Trishul to the blockbusters of the 1990s and 2000s.

 

From humble beginnings to cinematic supremacy

Yash Chopra: Gimmicks don’t help films

Deepa Gahlot: Good, gracious and warm

Shailesh Kapoor: Deewaar was his best

The Anchor: Lakshmipathy Bhat on 4 reasons why Yash Chopra was such a marketing savvy craftsman

But you don’t need to read MxMIndia for all of this. Read any of the morning papers – save pockets in the East where the papers have taken off for Pujo – and you’ll find detailed accounts and filmographies.

 

We have all known of the various films that Yash Chopra and his son Aditya Chopra have made. Or his son Uday may have acted in. But then there are several others – like the recent blockbuster Ek Tha Tiger – which they have produced.

 

There’s a distribution company and a studio… Satyamev Jayate, for instance, was shot there. There’s a music company. There’s also Y Films headed by former MTV India head Ashish Patil which has made films such as Mujhse Fraandship Karoge.

 

Yash Chopra’s YRF had got into television early on Doordarshan with a music talent show ‘Meri Awaz Suno’ but its foray with Sony Entertainment Television was a failure. Music videos have also happened – for Lata Mangeshkar no less – and also for the rendering of former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s poems (by Jagjit Singh and filmed on Shah Rukh Khan).

 

YRF also has a unit for making advertisement films. A series of ad films was shot for Dabur products as the division was publicized with much fanfare.

On the digital sphere, the company has the customary websites and assorted film-related content available on mobiles.

 

Stepping further, YRF has also got into the act of licensing and merchandising… essentially for its own film.

 

Credit for much of the expansion would go to Aditya Chopra, but it was all with Yashji’s active participation. The ace film-maker has also been active with a variety of industry bodies, and a near-permanent fixture at FICCI-Frames. In fact he was among the first in the old cinema order who recognized convergence and the role that technology could play in media and entertainment.

 

RIP, Yash Chopra.

 

 Photograph: Fotocorp

 

In the shark-infested waters of Bollywood, you can’t honestly say about many people, that he was a good human being. Yash Chopra was – good, gracious, warm, with that sense of old-style Punjabi bhaichara that’s hard to fake… or replicate. Never mind what you thought of his films, he greeted you with a smile. As industry power centre and leader, he was constantly surrounded with obsequious people – he actually managed to ignore all the toadying and retain his simplicity.

 

He lived a long and charmed life, active till the age of 80 when, after wrapping up Jab Tak Hai Jaan, announced his retirement from directing on his birthday.

 

When he had made Veer Zaara in 2004, this critic had called it his swan song… it was a distillation of all his concerns, a looking back at an age of innocence and pure love. No, he had corrected… this is not the end; till he had stories to tell, he would make films. But, he had also ruefully admitted that the kind of script and dialogue writing that appealed to him was getting harder to come by.

 

The man who took Hindi cinema overseas, and pioneered the diaspora film trend said in an interview, “We are losing a lot of things in our culture. In our music, the soul is gone… the Indian melody is gone. They say that the market is dictated by the youth and get away with anything. China and Japan have not lost their identity. The advantage of going global is that people are rejecting formula films. They are patronizing new kinds of cinema. The disadvantage is loss of identity. You hardly see Indian costumes in our films any more, or hear Indian melody. You hardly get to hear powerful dialogues in our films. In the old days there used to be special dialogue writers with a knowledge of the language, who wrote those dialogues that people still remember. Maybe now people want simple, colloquial dialogue, but you don’t hear audiences clapping any more, or crying in emotional scenes. Dialogue ka zamana chala gaya.”

 

Yashji, as everyone called him, had come to be known for his romantic films with his chiffon-clad heroines and dashing heroes, but fact is he was always been a trend-setter and always a little ahead of the times, which is why Yash Raj Films turned into an industry force. It may have had inputs from his son Aditya Chopra, but the senior Mr Chopra’s business and creative faculties were razor-sharp.

 

Let’s not forget, he made some hard-hitting films like Dhool Ka Phool, Dharmaputra, Ittefaq and later Deewar, Trishul, Kala Patthar. To him goes the credit for the multi-starrer trend with the evergreen Waqt. Once his romantic films clicked, however, he switched tracks and after films like Kabhi Kabhie, Silsila, Chandni and Lamhe, made the youthful Dil To Pagal Hai and poignant Veer Zaara.

 

And even if it took him eight years to come up with that one last film, nobody could ever say, Yashji ka zamana chala gaya. Even after he has gone, he has left enough films, trends, stars, songs and emotions behind for film fans around the world to remember him by – a legacy that goes far beyond the formidable gates of his YRF Studios.

 

By A Correspondent

 

Fifty-three years after he made his film debut with Dhool Ka Phool, 37 years after he directed Deewar – probably the most famous movie in any Indian language after Sholay – and barely a month after his 80th birthday was celebrated with the who’s who of Bollywood in attendance, Yash Chopra passed away in the city of Mumbai, his lady love for the last six decades.

 

The man who came from pre-Partition Lahore with Rs 200 in his pocket and went on to make iconic movies like Kabhi Kabhi, Silsila, Lamhe, Kaala Patthar and Trishul succumbed to dengue fever on Sunday. Mr Chopra, widely credited with making Bollywood into an international brand, had to cancel a trip to the Swiss Alps for the filming of the last remaining song sequence in his upcoming film.

 

@Twitter Just got the news that Yashji passed on. He was one of the giants of cinema. My deepest condolences to his family. We will all miss him. – @MadhuriDixit1Heartbreaking news Yash Chopra passes away. – @MaheshNBhatt   I’m in shock and numb, can’t believe the news, the man who immortalised love, Mr. Yash Chopra is no more. May his soul rest in peace. My deepest condolences to the family. – @akshaykumar   My mornings will never be the same. My learnings of life will never be the same. LOVE never be the same. And cinema will NEVER be the Same. – @AnupamPkher   I’m shocked & saddened by the loss of Hindi Cinema’s legend – Yash ji. romance in cinema will always be incomplete without u. RIP – @mbhandarkar268

“The world called my cinema bold but I never thought of it as that. I just wanted to make different cinema,” Mr Chopra had told Shah Rukh Khan at his 80th birthday at his Yashraj Studios a month back

 

“Though he’s known for romance genre, he has been equally competent across genres. Because of his own literary depth, you never heard his characters speak bad language, grammatically wrong language; he had a level of aesthetics and he never compromised on that. With his love of language, lyrics, Urdu, he demanded a level of language and poetry in his lyrics and his films,” said Javed Akhtar, the co-script writer of Deewar, the movie that launched Amitabh Bachchan as a superstar.

 

Born in Lahore in 1932, Chopra began his career as an assistant director to IS Johar and his elder brother, BR Chopra. He has won several awards, including the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2001 and the Padma Bhushan in 2005 for his contributions towards Indian cinema. Born in 1932 in Lahore, now in Pakistan, Mr Chopra was favoured by leading Indian actors with his movies seen as a sure-fire way to become a hit with audiences.

 

The filmmaker proved his mettle with intensely emotional and tragic movies, many of which went on to become box-office blockbusters. Mr Chopra’s Bollywood career spanned five decades. His flamboyant style of filmmaking, movies filmed in exotic locales and mellifluous music became a hallmark, endearing him to filmgoers.

 

Chiffon sarees and the Swiss Alps are so synonymous with Mr Chopra’s style of filmmaking that Switzerland Tourism even offered visitors a guided tour of the places where the director filmed some of his most famous songs and scenes.

 

Riding on his success, Mr Chopra established Yash Raj Films, one of Bollywood’s biggest production houses, churning out at least three movies a year. In November, the film studio announced its foray into Hollywood, signing on actors such as Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman for its overseas productions.

 

Mr Chopra also produced Indian cinema’s longest-running blockbuster, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), which marked the debut of his son, Aditya, as director.

 

“I have never made romantic films. I have made films on human relations, and humans are complicated people,” he said at the event in September.

 

Jab Tak Hai Jaan, with Chopra at the helm for the last time, opens in cinemas in November, eight years after his last project, Veer-Zaara, a passionate tale of love across borders.