Well-known producer Anand Pandit remembers watching blockbusters in cinema halls in the seventies and remembers the euphoria that the audiences would greet their favorite stars with. “They would whistle, cheer, clap, dance, throw coins at the screen,” he recalls and says, “I have also seen films where people laughed at the wrong places and you just knew that the story was not working. I understood very early that it is the audience that makes or breaks a film. Today there is so much emphasis on ratings and reviews but even now it is the audience that eventually contributes to the success or the failure of a project.”He adds that even though he respects the opinions of critics, he gives equal importance to feedback that comes his way from the audiences. He explains, “Some of the most successful makers in the industry watch their films with the audiences and take away insights that would not be possible to glean from a critic’s review. Every opinion matters in the end when you are in a creative industry because you are not making a film in a vacuum. You cannot influence an audience to think in a certain way. They are the ones that influence the box office outcome of your film. It is because of word of mouth reviews that a small-budget film like ’12th Fail’ did such good business.”Talking about the cinema of the present, he says, “I guess, what we are missing out on today is an emotional connection with the audiences. If a film cannot stir them emotionally, move them, make them laugh, cry or feel invested in characters, it will not click. Why do we remember certain films that were made in the sixties, seventies and eighties even today? It is because they spoke to us. This is the quality we need to bring back in our storytelling in order to win our audience back.”
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