Shekhar Kapur teases Masoom sequel
Shekhar Kapur plans to examine "the idea of home" with his upcoming 'Masoom' sequel.
Shekhar Kapur's 'Masoom' sequel will be about "the idea of home".
The 77-year-old filmmaker made his directorial debut in 1983 with an adaptation of Erich Segal's 1980 novel 'Man, Woman and Child' - which followed a family whose life was thrown into disarray with the arrival of the father's son from an earlier affair - believes the themes of 'Masoom... The New Generation' will be familiar to many.
Speaking after the success of his latest movie 'What's Love Got to Do with It?' at the National Film Awards earlier this week, Shekhar told Variety: “If you look at ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?,’ you realise it was a joint family system, which in that part of the world lasted a long time. And not just India, but across South Asia.
“One of the big things has been happening is that kids have been moving away – from small towns to Mumbai, Mumbai to the west. They go out for their education and don’t go back, and every time I’ve talked to them there is this little thing that bothers them, a guilt that never goes away, a feeling that ‘I left my parents’.”
Details of how 'Masoom... The New Generation' ties in with the 1983 original are being kept under wraps, but the director did reveal it will centre on a couple in their 80s in a crumbling house and "generational change".
He added: “When when you talk to people about home, the first thing they say is that it is property, it is real estate and the second thing they say is ‘What’s it worth?’
"The real estate value of your house becomes much more important than what the essential idea for home is.
"And home is, what is it? It is memories – people growing up, the walls have memories, the sofa where you sit down is a memory. Everything is a memory. So I’m taking that fundamental idea of what is home."
The actor-turned-director hopes to get back to his "naive" early days of filmmaking with the project.
He said: “I was looking to do a film that I could go back to being naive, almost, because ‘Masoom’ was from somebody who’d never made a film before, didn’t know how to make a film, went in and made a film, had nothing, no technical competence or experience or skill to fall back on – so just fell back on telling a real human story.
“Whenever I look back, and even when I look at ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?,’ I realise what I was doing then and I’m doing now is making all characters very human, because that’s how I see them – very human.
"So ‘Masoom’ is the way of going back to just making the stories of the simplicity of being human and the complexity of being human but staying human and the story being human."
