Shekhar Kapur: Earlier, the idea of sexuality meant seducing the girl, but now you’d be caught in MeToo movement

There was a time when art of seduction was presumed as the love language, which was also reflected in the world of cinema. And the #MeToo movement has wiped that off, which filmmaker Shekhar Kapur considers is a great change.

“There was a time when we thought that the idea of sexuality is that you had to seduce the girl. Now, if I seduce a girl, I will be caught in the #MeToo movement,” Kapur says.

The filmmaker elaborates, “Now, this thought is not there, and the girl is also a decision maker as much as the boy. It is about being consensual. The idea that, ‘Haye kitna sharmati hai’, and that the girl is supposed to be shy, and you are supposed to be there to seduce her out of her shyness, is now MeToo. And we have let it go.”

Kapur, who is back in the world of cinema with his Hollywood project, What’s Love Got to Do with It?, feels the #MeToo movement has had a lasting impact in the cinema world.

“It has been a very good movement for the whole industry, and it was something which was needed. We could not have gone on in the way that we used to earlier. For instance, when I was working on Masoom (1983), and went out to look for a child actor, everyone I spoke to didn’t want to enter the industry. Because they didn’t trust us. They didn’t trust how the women are treated here. They thought that women were not treated well. The way we looked at women was wrong. And now that has changed,” says the filmmaker, whose last feature-length directorial effort was the Cate Blanchett-starrer drama Elizabeth: The Golden Age in 2007.

When it comes to his projects, he has always tried to break the thought by brining bring the multi-faceted side of womanhood through his projects be it Bandit Queen (1994), Mr. India (1987) or cross-cultural project, What’s Love Got to Do with It?.

“With every project of mine, I have inevitably shown a very strong female,” he proudly admits.