"There’s a dearth of great, original ideas"

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: He gave us Ankur, Manthan, Nishant, Bhumika and biopics on Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose, a stunning documentary on filmmaker Satyajit Ray and much much more. Shyam Benegal returns to the villages once more to bring us a comedy, Welcome to Sajjanpur, which is releasing on September 19. Benegal speaks to Sudipta Datta on the changes sweeping across villages in India, how the film industry is going through a glorious phase and why it needs an injection of great original ideas. Excerpts:

You have witnessed the change in rural India, documented it in your films — how have our villages evolved?

The effect of globalisation is being felt everywhere. A lot of things have changed. For example, technology has made a huge difference in the villages — now you have television, cellphones and even the internet. The level of information has gone up. Now, you may be remote, but you are no longer isolated. But one of the main problems is that our literacy levels are still very low, especially in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan. The comedy I have filmed is set in Bundelkhand and the tale is surrounded around the low literacy levels in the village.

Did you shoot on location or in the studio?

Unfortunately, we couldn’t have shot on location even if we wanted to, because the particular village is quite remote. So we recreated a village at Ramoji’s film studio in Hyderabad.

It’s the story of a letter-writer?

Yes, there are one or two educated people in the village and they have to survive by writing letters. Did you know that the last letter writer of Bombay retired some months ago? He used to sit outside GPO and write letters for survival. If you are a letter-writer, you wield a certain power over the people, because you are privy to a lot of information — that’s what I have tried to bring out.

You have been working in the film industry for three decades. How has it changed?

Well, over the last 30 years, the change has been tremendous. The film industry is growing by 15-20% annually. This is unprecedented, even in its hey days, the industry grew by 3-6% at best. Today, the market is growing everywhere; there’s a huge explosion of revenues in urban India, not least due to the multiplexes; a variety of films are being made — today content can be different depending on the sensibilities of the audience. And the young people have the opportunity to make films of their choice.

Do you wish things were different during your earlier film-making days?

Everything was worth it. I don’t regret a thing. Everything I went through was very important for one’s development. The good thing now is films are being made on sub-cultures too and are proving to be successful, this was unthinkable even ten years ago.

You are talking about films like Rock On...

Yes. And Aamir. Would you have thought Rock On would be a hit even a decade ago. Films like Aamir couldn’t have been made because there were no avenues for such films.

What are you working on next?

Well, it also happens to be a comedy — BIG Pictures is producing it.

What about the musical Chamki?

It’s in the works. It’s not always easy to do a big project because you don’t know who you are going to people it with. One downside of the industry doing well is that artists are now tied to projects two years in advance.

The film industry is doing phenomenally well, what are the hitches?