“I like to see women getting drenched in the rain. So to that extent, I like ‘Barsaat.’”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Everyone can have a crush on anyone, be it on a real person or a celebrity.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I have learnt the hard way that ignoring a small fry can be many times harmful.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I hate the word ‘break.’ It’s just a business deal at the end of the day so there’s no such thing as giving a break.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I think a lot before tweeting. I show it like I don’t, but I do. Sometimes I don’t mean it, sometimes I mean it, and sometimes I like to provoke a reaction from people. I enjoy reactions from them.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Fundamentally speaking, bodies age; feelings don’t.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Basically, I am an anti-social person.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I like people who have clarity about their work.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I don’t believe in gratitude.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“To see Sridevi making tea in Boney Kapoor’s kitchen was a huge letdown. I won’t forgive him because he brought the angel down from heaven to the kitchen of his apartment.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“It is stupid to think the audience is a bunch of fools who can be manipulated by long titles and NRI romances.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I don’t want to answer questions about my favourite food or holiday spot.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I despise all those who fight for peace. It’s only the bad guys and the troublemakers who create entertaining and history-changing events.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Language is just a communication tool; it is the content that decides the fate of a film.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I’m an atheist, and I don’t believe in ghosts.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Since everyone has a mouth, everyone will have an opinion.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I don’t work with anyone out of a sense of charity. I use people as long as they are useful to me.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“The people who work with me know how focused I am, and so I would advise people who are not concerned with me to rather focus on themselves instead of focusing on my focus.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Everything in ‘Satya’ was by chance. It was a film which just started evolving by itself. I just went mostly by instinct and kept on improvising on location, and the film just got made itself.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I make movies on gritty topics like crime, the underworld, and horror. I don’t make movies with good-looking people in good-looking locales.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Modern warfare has become too techno-ish for my sensibilities.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Many people don’t understand that in filmmaking, if you make a fundamental mistake, everything goes wrong – but you don’t realise it till the film is made.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“The point is that a filmmaker is like a journalist in projecting reality in the true sense of the word. Only thing is he dramatically packages it to make more effect.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Any film I make, my intention is always to make people like it.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“My favourite virtue is not having any.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I grew up with Western films, and I always wondered why Bollywood never made films like that. Why do we always have to break into song?”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I have a habit of constantly dreaming and waking up every once in a while in the night to check out my cell phone, and I suddenly saw a message that Sridevi is no more… I thought that either it’s a nightmare or a hoax, and I went back to sleep.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“It is none of anyone’s business how I make my films or my creative partnerships.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“The reason I make more films is that I work all the time without taking a break, and I enjoy it.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Sridevi is the most beautiful and the most sensuous woman God ever created, and I think He creates such exquisite pieces of art like her only once in a thousand years.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I feel there are only well acted or badly acted roles and no such thing as a good actor or actress.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Let me put it this way: if ‘The Godfather’ hadn’t been made, ‘Sarkaar’ wouldn’t have been made. That is the truth.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“In the business of entertainment, either I am able to create an effect that impresses people or not.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I hate it that there are so many beautiful women in the world, and I can’t have all of them for myself.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“With ‘Daud,’ basically, I wanted to make a very ‘Mad Max’ kind of a film: that was my original intention.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“’Not A Love Story’ is inspired by true events, but it is not based on those events completely. When I first read about the Maria Susairaj case, I was fascinated with the psychological aspects, that two seemingly very ordinary people can go completely berserk.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“’The Godfather’ has been a film which has influenced me a lot.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I honestly feel it is important for a director to get obsessed with the characters.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“If ‘Bhoot’ was called ‘Man Ke Rishte,’ no one would be interested. The title is a very essential part of a film. It subconsciously prepares the audience as to what they can expect.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“The whole idea of making ‘James’ was to make an action film in the style of the 1970s and ’80s.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I wrote ‘Kshana Kshanam’ with the one and only purpose of impressing Sridevi. ‘Kshana Kshanam’ was my love letter to her.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Maybe ‘Bhoot’ wasn’t scary for me because I made it.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“The problem is I don’t have respect for the films I make after I’ve made them. I detach myself and get embarrassed when I watch them later.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Any film, whether it worked at the box office or not, I’ll have my favourite moments from it.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I always had a fair share of hits and flops.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I don’t have the time to think about what someone else thinks of me because I’m busy making films.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“When I have a new idea, I’m charged up and want to start the film immediately, but I simply don’t have the patience to wait for stars.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Ultimately, cinema is an actor’s medium.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I have become a full-fledged producer. I spend a lot of time on pre-production work.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“’Bhoot’ is a hold-on-to-your-seats horror film, while ‘Darna Manaa Hai’ is a hold-on-to-your-popcorn horror film.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“My greatest dream is to make a film on ‘The Fountainhead,’ which I have been restraining from doing because it is so much in the mind, and I am yet to be able to decode that.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Following the West is not surrendering. Following the West, the best of the West, is following originality.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“With my films, I’m targeting the urban multiplexes, the sophisticated media-savvy young crowd.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Everyone knows about Amitabh Bachchan being a legendary actor, and I had this sense of arrogance that I can make him do what I want. But what he did on locations completely blew me away. I realised that I understand the quality of performances even more after seeing him perform.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“First of all, ‘Sarkar’ is not an underworld film. It’s about a man at the head of a feudal set-up in the middle of a cosmopolitan city, where he almost runs a parallel government largely due to his personal charisma. And the film is about his friends and enemies and his family.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I would say that if a man like Balasaheb Thackeray can exist, ‘Sarkar’ can exist.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Some of my scripts need the larger catchment area of Bollywood. But some suit Telugu films.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“In Telugu, I have ‘Bejawada Rowdilu,’ a movie on the gang war culture in Vijayawada.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“All my movies are copies of Hollywood, some of them pretty trashy copies. All filmmakers copy from Hollywood.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“The shelf life of a specific film has decreased while the number of films required to fill multiplex cinemas has increased.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Today, filmmaking isn’t just about shooting and releasing. You’ve to structure the marketing of a film.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Stars work because of familiarity. They fill theatres because audiences know who they are. There is a brand equity. But there are films strong enough to not need stars, or films that should not be made with stars at all, where only fresh faces will do. So I make the decisions accordingly.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“The thing about audiences is that we can’t generalise them. It’s very unfair.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“’Naach’ doesn’t have any of the traditional, conventional ingredients of a love story.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“It’s understandably obvious, when I was making ‘Company,’ of the underworld genre, people would compare it to ‘Satya.’”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“When I believe in an actor, I believe there is something in that actor.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“The industry has a standard way of judging actors: they do ten films, they get X price, and they get this number of awards, seen at page three parties and all that – that is how they measure success. I don’t do it like that.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“People favouring their relatives more than an outsider is what the biggest fight in democracy is, let it be in film industry or politics.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Our society has a mentality that elderly people pass on their wealth to their son or immediate relatives, and I think we all do it. It’s a part of nature and is an exaggerated topic.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I feel that Sarkar is a realistic superman in his life.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I don’t think cinema is big or small. It’s just good or bad.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I understand emotions more than anyone else. I study emotions like a biologist studies various species.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“When I was making ‘Satya’, many people said that nobody would like to watch such dirty people. But, when the film worked, the same people said it was so real that they could actually smell it!”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“In Tamil, three-hour films are normal.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I have made only two films on the underworld. I am not educating the people on the underworld.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I hate Sridevi. I hate her for making me realise that she, too, is finally only just a human being. I hate that her heart, too, has to beat to live.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“My journey to Sridevi started when I was preparing for my debut film ‘Shiva.’ I used to walk from Nagarjuna’s office in Chennai to a neighbouring street where Sridevi used to live, and I used to just stand and watch Sridevi’s house from outside her gate.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“’Satya’ and ‘Company’ are two very dark and brooding relationship films; there was no hero.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“’D’ is about a guy who starts off somewhere, and he’s a very thinking kind of a guy. He’s not an emotional person; he doesn’t react to situations. Instead, he’s virtually choreographing the situations. So it’s a development of a character.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I think every star was a new actor at one point of time.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“A film, I feel, is a state of mind. A film eventually comes from an idea: based on an idea, you make a decision, and once you make the decision, you keep comparing everything to that, but don’t question the decision itself.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“You are likely to make more mistakes with a light-hearted film than a serious one.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I don’t think I take risks. People think I do, but I don’t. In fact, I think conventional-formula filmmakers take more risks than me.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I have always put the same effort in all my films irrespective of their outcome.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Great films happen, and no one can make them on intention.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I make movies on the subjects that excite me.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“’Rakta Charitra’ was more about human conflict than politics.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“When you do anything completely different from a beaten path, many tend to pounce on you.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I sometimes think many reviewers write the reviews of my films even before they see them.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Now a lot of people tell me that ‘Daud’ was ahead of its times. But when it came out, it was panned more than any of my films.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“My driver shops for me; he selects my clothes. That is why my driver and I wear the same clothes.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Films are all I know. I wouldn’t know what to do with a day off.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“A film sells feelings.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Films like ‘Satya,’ ‘Company’ needed a pan-Indian audience. The affinity for Hindi film and subjects was there.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I never think of a film after I finish it.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“I don’t think I have the patience required to undertake projects as huge as ‘Baahubali.’ You need to spend a lot of time and years to make something empowering like that.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“As a director and a creative person, I can say banning anything is wrong.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Even the biggest flops have been liked by a few select people.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
“Romantic films are not a genre I would choose.”
― Ram Gopal Varma
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