When Satyajit Ray referred to as Indian viewers ‘backward, unsophisticated’ for backlash on Sharmila Tagore-starrer Devi

Satyajit talked in regards to the movie in his 1960 movie to French journalist Pierre Andre Boutang in 1989. Sharmila performed the position of a younger lady who’s seen as an avatar of goddess Kali within the movie that additionally featured Soumitra Chatterjee and Chhabi Biswas.

Satyajit mentioned within the previous interview, “I once made a film called the goddess Devi, it dealt with religious dogmatism, it didn’t attack religion as such, it attacked dogmatism, the extreme form of religion…But people (are) writing in the papers that ‘Oh! Mr Ray is not a Hindu, he is making such films against Hinduism’. But they are stupid people you can’t take them into account. This happens in India all the time. We have a fairly backward audience here, in spite of the film society movement and all that, if you consider the audience at large, it is a backward audience.”

He added, “An unsophisticated audience, exposed to the commercial Hindi cinema more than anything else. And so you face this problem, but you make the kind of films (you want to) and I make the kind of films that I want to make. I make the kind of films that I enjoy making… that engages my attention, my creativity, that is all I can do.”

He additionally mentioned that many concepts in his story Alien “are in ET” (E.T. the Additional-Terrestrial, the 1989 movie). He additionally mentioned that he labored in Hollywood for 5 weeks and there have been many copies of his screenplay (at Colombia Footage) on the story, making it accessible for many individuals to learn it. A middle-man’s “peculiar behaviour” made Satyajit “drop the idea” of working with Hollywood. Somebody then alleged that Steven Spielberg stole the story of ET from Satyajit Ray’s Alien, however “Spielberg, of course, denied it”, the filmmaker mentioned.