Mumbai film a bad idea, says Vikram Bhatt

The controversy over Indian film-maker Ram Gopal Varma's visit to the devastated Taj hotel on Sunday within hours of it being cleared by security forces continues to rumble in Bollywood. According to the Indo-Asian News Service, the producer-director Vikram Bhatt (pictured left) has entered the fray by claiming that any film about the terrorist attack on Mumbai is a bad idea because "it's a bad script - it's an episode of defeat. Who would want to watch it as everything ended on a sad note."

Bhatt, maker of such films as Raaz and Ghulam, and best known in the Indian gossip columns for his recent break-up after five years with the
lovely Bollywood actress Amish Patel (right), went on: "We should not call it a victory. It has been controlled and contained. They (the terrorists) were ready to die, so killing them is not a victory."

He makes the point that if the security forces had managed to kill the terrorists on Wednesday night when they first attacked at the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station where 56 people were killed, that might have made a movie. "Then I would have called it a victory, but it did not happen so."

As reported here yesterday, Ram Gopal Varma was able to visit the Taj because his actor friend Ritiesh Deshmukh is the son of the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, Vilasrao Deshmukh, who has since tendered his resignation in the light of public criticism of the security response. Varma still claims that he has no intention of making a film, and "just happened" to be visiting Ritiesh to discuss a script, but few in Bollywood choose to believe him.