Shekhar Kapur's classic Masoom was screened at the Indian Film Festival in Germany, and the veteran filmmaker took to the podium to talk about making the film out of a place of inexperience and naivety that helped the making of the film while sharing that he is about to make its sequel this year. It will see the return of Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah, who played the principal characters in the 1983 film.
Speaking about returning to the world of Masoom in the sequel, Kapur said it's an "attempt to go back to my childhood. How do I become naive again? Because even Picasso said that when they asked him, 'What do you really want?' He said, 'I want to paint like I've never made a painting before.' And that was Masoom which was made by a person who did not know a thing about it. So I just said, 'Okay, let me try.' And so I just had to concentrate on the story because I didn't know what a camera was and how that worked and everything. So maybe something worked."
Kapur found the audience's strong emotional response to it surprising given the fact that he wasn't a "trained filmmaker". "I'd never made a film. I'd never assisted anybody. I had not studied filmmaking. I knew nothing about film and then one day I just made a film and I was a chartered accountant in London."
He also recalled the time when he briefly worked as an accountant in Germany, after which he went back to make the film.
"There's an innocence to when you're absolutely naive about what you're doing. You do things differently. So when people say, can you make Masoom again? I say, 'Can you make me naive again?'" he added.
Based on Erich Segal's book Man, Woman and Child, Masoom centred on a family whose peaceful existence is disrupted when it's revealed that the husband has an illegitimate child from a past relationship. It was adapted by lyricist and screenwriter Gulzar, with music by R D Burman.
Shekar Kapur's last directorial feature was What's Love Got to Do with It? a romantic comedy scripted by Jemima Khan.