When four top directors of Bollywood came together to explore the theme of lust, they ended up choosing female protagonists and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who has directed one of the four stories in the anthology film, says the reason could be that men's lust is "boring and typical".
Titled "Lust Stories", the Netflix movie brings together four short films, helmed by filmmakers like Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar.
All the films talk about female desire through several characters- a teacher-student relationship in Kashyap's, the relationship between a maid and her employer in Zoya's film, a woman's extramarital affair in Dibakar's and a newly-wed but unhappy wife in Johar's short.
"It was by chance that the protagonists are women. In our country, when you talk about lust, men's lust gets so boring, it's typical, it's reduced to a sexual desire. We didn't want to address it like that," Kashyap told PTI.
"In a country which has so much repressed sexuality, where a woman is not supposed to have lust, I think that's why somewhere all of us chose a woman as the protagonist."
"There is some incredible trust that we have, I've done three shorts with her. The amount of trust she gives me, I get it from very few actors. I get it from Nawazuddin and Radhika. I feel I can push her anywhere. She is very honest. I throw things at her and she bounces it back."
"We went like that. I got her into a conversation and then shot it."
He praised Apte for being "comfortable with contradictions."
"A man wants to be a Ram, a woman wants to be a Sita. Nobody wants to play it real with their contradictions, vulnerabilities, weaknesses. Radhika understands that."
The "Mukkabaaz" director said there was no script for the short. What one sees on screen is a result of "bouncing off ideas at each other."
"Even Akash trusted me, that if this is your process, I'll become a part. Everybody wants characters to be defined with certainty, that this person knows what he/she is talking about. But here, we are like 'this person knows what she is talking about till she talks about it the next time.'
"She has so many versions, and all so self-serving and Radhika was comfortable doing that. We were laughing while doing it."
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