Shahid Kapoor goes by gut feeling, not box-office formula

Fronting rom-com Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya when action movies are ruling the roost, Shahid says artistes must present their vision to audience fearlessly

Bollywood can keep doling out action films, but Shahid Kapoor is in the mood for love. After fronting crime thriller Farzi and action fare Bloody Daddy last year, the actor was keen to return to the romantic comedy genre. His wish came true quickly. “I wanted to change things up. I had grown up watching [rom-com] movies, and was missing them. Maybe we weren’t making good ones, maybe the directors who aced them were not as fresh now—I was thinking all these things when I found this script,” he says, referring to Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya. The Kapoor and Kriti Sanon-starrer promises to be a breezy story of a guy falling in love with a humanoid robot.

Surely, a novel choice, but not risk-proof. Kapoor is aware that spectacle movies are dominating the scene today. But the actor goes by his gut feeling, not box-office formula. “You can either be success-oriented or creatively driven. [Ideally], you should have a balance of both. But with time, as a fraternity, we are looking at the audience to tell us what they want to watch and then we go around making it. By the time it’s out, how do you know the audience still feels like that? I backed my feeling, and didn’t wait for the audience to tell me.” Following one’s gut feeling is not easy, but he believes that an artiste and his art must be brave. “My job as an artiste is to make a film and ask you, ‘Did you like it?’ I cannot want the answer before posing the question. You have to be braver than that.” 

In his two-decade career, the actor has constantly mixed things up, juggling a romantic comedy in Jab We Met (2007) and a gritty thriller in Kaminey (2009), a masala fare in R… Rajkumar (2013) and an intense drama in Haider (2014). To him, making unsafe choices is the only way to sustain stardom. “Today, people get bored fast. Stardom in [all its mystique] was relevant 20 years ago because you got to watch a star only at the movies. But now, you see a star everywhere. It’s more difficult to hold on to your stardom. Your talent, craft and choices will reignite the audience’s interest in you. So, safe choices are unsafe, and unsafe choices are safer today.

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