The 100th birth anniversary of Shakti Samanta, one of India's finest filmmakers, was celebrated on January 13. On this memorable occasion, Shakti Samanta's talented son, Ashim Samanta, spoke exclusively with Bollywood Hungama about his legendary father and some of his famous works. A lot has been spoken about his films, its music, legacy etc. In this part, we'll focus on a lesser talked about, but significant film made by his father, Debdas (2002).
2002 is highly remembered as three films on freedom fighter Bhagat Singh were released within a gap of two weeks - the Ajay Devgn-starrer The Legend Of Bhagat Singh, Bobby Deol-Sunny Deol starrer 23rd March 1931: Shaheed and Sonu Sood-starer Shaheed-E-Azam. Many are not aware that two films on Devdas also arrived the same year within short intervals, though both were in two different languages. The Hindi film starred Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Madhuri Dixit. The Bengali film, Debdas, was directed by Shakti Samanta and starred Prosenjit Chatterjee.
Bollywood Hungama asked Ashim Samanta if his father had apprehensions about releasing Debdas in the same year as Devdas. He said, "I asked him, 'Why do you want to make the film? Sanjay Leela Bhansali is already making it, that too with Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri, Aishwarya Rai'. From the stills, it was clear that it was mounted on a gigantic scale. However, he said, 'My film will be in Bengali. I wanted to make it for a very long time. It will be made in Bengali style for the Bengali audience'. My worry was that Devdas might release before our film. However, my Dad was confident that the Devdas would take time as it had faced a lot of delays."
Ashim confessed, "The first half of Debdas seemed dated. However, the last four reels were fabulous. It was no less than Devdas, which was made at 100 times the budget. In fact, I would say that the last 3 reels of Debdas were better than Devdas! But due to the boring first half, people couldn't completely connect with the film. Bhansali's Devdas, meanwhile, was released 2-3 weeks later (and that impacted our film to some extent). Another misfortune was that the FIFA World Cup was also held at the same time. In Bengal, the craze for football is something else."
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