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Madhur Bhandarkar is best known for his gritty, hard-hitting women-led films. However, he believes that the grit and glamour varies in each of his projects and therefore requires a different budget each time. For instance, he once quipped that the total budget of his 2001 National Award-winning film Chandni Bar was equal to just the costumes budget of his 2012 film Heroine.
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“I made the movie (Chandni Bar) on a very small budget. So much so, that I once jokingly told Kareena (Kapoor) that I had made Chandni Bar on a budget that was smaller than what I spent on her clothes in Heroine (laughs),” Bhandarkar once told a leading daily.
The filmmaker added that he didn’t get enough budget for Chandni Bar because he wasn’t an established name back then. His debut film, Trishakti (1999), starring Arshad Warsi, didn’t work at the box office, which made it an uphill task to secure a decent budget for his sophomore film, despite the fact that it starred Tabu in the lead role.
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“When I approached producers for it, they wanted me to put some item numbers in the film, which I didn’t want to. My first film did not work, so there was a lot of pressure on me, but I was hell-bent on making the film the way I wanted to,” said Bhandarkar, adding, “It was very risky. People even had a problem with the title of the film. Many thought it was very cheap, and a B-grade title. I researched the film for about six months.”
In a 2011 op-ed for the Times of India, Madhur Bhandarkar defended his statement of comparing the total budget of Chandni Bar with the costumes budget of Heroine, claiming that he wasn’t being “condescending”. He argued that the subject dictates the requirement of money. While Chandni Bar was the story of a prostitute in a red-light area of Mumbai, Heroine revolved around a leading female actor’s struggle to navigate the sexist Hindi film industry.
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Bhandarkar claimed that exaggerated budgets don’t necessarily guarantee box office success. He said along with Chandni Bar, even his other films — Konkona Sen Sharma-starrer Page 3 (2005), Bipasha Basu-starrer Corporate (2006), Kunal Kemmu-starrer Traffic Signal (2007), and Neil Nitin Mukesh-starrer Jail (2009) were also critically acclaimed as well as “fetched terrific return on investments” despite being made on modest budgets.
Also Read — Mahesh Bhatt abused me during Chandni Bar release, asked me to make the most of it, recalls Madhur Bhandarkar: ‘I needed the reality check’
However, his films like Dil Toh Bacha Hai Ji (2011) and Heroine would naturally demand bigger budgets because they are being carried on the shoulders of bigger stars like Ajay Devgn, Emraan Hashmi, and Kareena Kapoor, respectively. He claimed that the budget of Heroine would even be bigger than that of Priyanka Chopra-starrer Fashion (2008) because it’s set in the film industry, as opposed to the fashion world in the latter.
