‘I am Onir and I am Gay’: the filmmaker speaks of his candid memoir and how he got to write it – National Herald

He wonders why straight people have to be “taught” about and “made to understand” queerness, when heterosexuality as a norm was blatantly imposed on everybody. Those who are understanding would still want queerness to be subtle. ‘You can’t walk a certain way, talk a certain way, dress a certain way or you’ll become the object of mockery’, he says.

Although he has been making films on queers since 2005, actors still feel a certain discomfort when offered a queer role. He often is met with silence when he reaches out to actors, being told that the actor just played a gay person in a recent film and has already shown generosity towards the community, or that their manager told them not to play a queer character at this stage of their career.

“They forget we are not just characters. You might have played a gay character before, but the stories of each are different.” When he was working on a biopic of someone who lost his life to AIDS in the early 1990s, there was this unspoken presumption that desire wouldn’t be shown or talked about openly or freely, as if that’s something to be ashamed of.

“I love telling stories which I know are not being told, through which I can grow as a human being, and as an artist,” smiles the filmmaker. That’s what he wants to keep doing, making films which might one day become a part of the history of the Indian cinema. And he continues doing this, even as he realises each day that box office is neither his driving force nor his cup of tea.

Nothing compares to the experience of watching a film on the big screen – sharing the energy of seeing a story unfold with 200 other people gasping at the same instant as you. And while he does acknowledge that OTT platforms have opened up content in new genres and new languages for the audiences, he personally isn’t a fan of the “OTT revolution”.

Like you had to get box office for the studios, the platforms put a huge emphasis on eyeballs. The filmmaker says that the platforms try to dictate what the trajectory of the story should be, where the turning points of the script would be. They want a twist every five minutes, and want every filmmaker to fit into the formula of what they perceive to be a hit web series or a hit film.