The monster behind the maverick?’ is what Ram Gopal Varma suggests, as a summing up of his personality, after a chat with LT. Read on to see if you agree… SMILE?” asks Ram Gopal Varma, when you ask him to pose for a picture. “I’m not known to smile,” he says. Remind him that he did smile, even guffaw, loads of times during the conversation, and pulls a straight face and says, “I’m not known to keep my word either.” It’s statements like these that must be getting him the reputation he has – that of a maverick, someone who’s “consistently a bad guy”, as he puts it. Women like bad guys. Do women
like him? “Uh… I don’t know. I certainly like the bad guys – villains and dictators and gangsters. They have more colourful love lives because they know how to live.” Ah! Does he like women? “I looove women.”
From Urmila to Jiah to Nisha – many women have been called his ‘muse’, a tag that he’s consistently protested against. The latest bombshell that he’s cast in his forthcoming Airport is Pratishta Chaudhary. Be that as it may, that’s not all that Ramu is known for. How did he get that reputation of a maverick? “I think it’s because of the radical kind of films I make, or the views I express. I can talk with the same intensity about a gangster’s psychology, and about an item girl’s thighs. So people don’t know whether I’m a serious filmmaker – which Satya and Company indicate – or the guy who’ll go and make an Aag. They don’t know who the real guy is. The point is, all of them is me,” he says.
He’s also interested in the bad guys and that interest is part of the reason that he makes movies on the underworld. “I’ve made musicals, love stories, spoofs, psychological thrillers and political dramas like Sarkar, but it’s the impact of the few gangster movies that I’ve made that makes people remember them,” he explains. “If Karan Johar makes the same kind of drama 10 times over, you don’t talk about that. The underworld is just something that’s constantly in the people’s minds.”
What’s his idea of success? “Success is being able to do whatever you want from the time you wake up in the morning to the time you go off to sleep at night. I might think of an idea, have coffee, look at bikini-clad pictures of girls in magazines, write a blog, intellectualise about something. The day I can’t do what I want to do… that’s the day when I know life’s not worth living,” he says. “People thought, after Aag, Ramu will be more careful. But in my latest, I’ve broken all the rules. Once, Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra and I were having lunch, and Aditya asked me, ‘How can you make movies like Satya and Kaun? It beats me.’ And I said, ‘See, if this waiter who’s serving us, if I start thinking of what he’ll like, I’ll be living my life for him, right?’ And he said no. But I said, ‘You’re actually doing it. You’re concerned about what the people in Nagpur think, what the rickshaw-wallah in Udaipur thinks… Which is fine. If that’s your high in life, if that makes you Rs 100 crores, perfectly fine. That’s not my high. I’m not better, I’m different, that’s all.’”
One more ‘muse’?Pratishta Chaudhary, who will feature in RGV’s next, Airport, will share screen space with Bobby Deol and four other actors. She has replaced Ameesha Patel, who was busy with other projects and could not do this one. The shooting of the movie will begin in September. “I was busy with my lip surgery and that is why the filming of the movie could not begin right off. I can’t talk about the movie in detail as of now,” she says.
