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Filmmaker Ektaa Kapoor recently attended the Waves event and an interesting anecdote about her 2011 film, The Dirty Picture, starring Vidya Balan in the titular year. The Balaji Telefilms owners that the film was initially exceeding its budget by Rs 10–12 crores on paper.
However, the team still decided to take the risk and moved forward with the film’s production using effective cost-cutting measures. The Dirty Picture went on to collect Rs 112 crores at the box office and even earned Vidya Balan a National Award.
Speaking about the initial challenges of making the film, Ektaa Kapoor said, “A film of mine called The Dirty Picture. It was about this woman who decided to take on a full male-dominated film industry. It was a real story, and we couldn’t buy the rights. So we said there were many women like this and we’ll make this new character.”
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“On paper, it was a 10 to 12 crore loss, a couple of million at that time. And I still remember we did our job of first reducing the cost to working around it to see that we supported with 3, 4 typically large scale films. And yet, without putting our investors in danger, make this content because you see at the cost of content I don’t want to downsize a company and make people lose their jobs,” the director shared.
Ektaa Kapoor continued, “You see, art and economics have to go hand in hand. We made the film because we said we would take it on ourselves to compensate the company with better work, more work, more commercial work so that the economics are not affected. But in fact, that one film became our biggest ROI even till today. It resonated; it gave us a whole new identity and brought us back. So, was that risk worth it? Yes.”
The Dirty Picture, released in 2011, is a musical drama inspired by the life of Sil Smitha and some of her contemporaries. It was directed by Milan Luthria and co-produced by Ektaa Kapoor and Shobha R Kapoor. In addition to Vidya Balan, the movie starrer Emraan Hashmi, Naseeruddin Shah, and Tusshar Kapoor.
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