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Mumbai Film Festival: Filmmakers lament dearth of good scripts

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(L-R) Sriram Raghavan, Sridhar Raghavan, Vishal Bhardwaj, Anjum Rajabali, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and Vikramaditya Motwane at MFF on Friday
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"I have a script with me right here," shouted an obviously frustrated Siddharth Das (32), a young film school student and writer who was attending a panel discussion on script writing on the fourth day of the 16th Mumbai Film Festival (MFF). Those at the discussion included Vishal Bhardwaj, Vikramaditya Motwane, Rakeysh Omprakahs Mehra, Sriram Raghvan and Sridhar Raghavan. And Das was reacting to a suggestion by the panelists that there was dearth of good scripts in India.

Motwane said: "More than 90% of the scripts we come across is very poor in quality and often unusable. When there is such a lack of original material, it's not surprising that filmmakers choose adaptations or remakes, as that is a safer option."

And who better to speak of adaptations than Bharadwaj, whose recent Haider completed his Shakespearean adaptations trilogy. "I have rarely found material that can translate well into a great screenplay. That is why I keep going back to Shakespeare," he said. Then perhaps realising how quickly the mood was dipping in the packed auditorium full of writers, he quickly added: "But as writers, you must keep your guns loaded all the time. You never know when opportunity strikes."

To cool the air, Sriram then asked young writers to show patience. "It took me 17 years after passing out of FTII to find someone willing to use my story. Today, given the explosion in social media, writers have it easy."

Sridhar too expanded on the theme saying unlike European or Iranian cinema, India was not restricted to just one language. "We have so many cinemas, and much of that space has not been explored. Today when Malayalam, Telugu and even Marathi films are able to not only stand up to Bollywood, but also give it tough competition, we need more and more good original writing which comes with the flavour of these languages and tells their stories."

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