'I am committed to the script and not any star'

Abhishek Kapoor has a penchant for introducing new faces and unusual pairings in his films.

First it was Farhan Akhtar in RockOn!” and then Sushant Singh Rajput and Rajkumar Rao for Kai Po Che! With  Fitoor he has reaffirmed his eye for unusual as the sizzling chemistry between Aditya Roy Kapur and Katrina Kaif is being much talked about before the release of the film. This is because the filmmaker doesn’t like to restrict his association with a coterie, like other filmmakers.

“I am committed to the script and not any star. I don’t operate like that. A lot of directors work with friends and then they will work around to see what the actor wants to do. I feel it is like chopping your hands and legs for future because once you do that... you are so used to them that you are dependent on that person,” he tells Metrolife. “Stars have their own agendas in life. And this attitude takes away the freedom from a director,” he adds.

“Fitoor is a departure from what he has done so far as a filmmaker. It is a love story based on Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations and is set to release on February 12. The film is set in Delhi, Kashmir and London. The reason for choosing Kashmir as one of the cities for shooting is because the Valley evokes romance, which forms the nucleus of this film.

“Kashmir isn’t like any other hiall station like Manali. It is surreal which fitted perfectly into the kind of setting I wanted for the film. Also, as a young boy, I saw a lot of movies being made in Kashmir. So you associated Kashmir with romance, so somewhere I started gravitating towards the Valley,” he says.

All his previous films are based on different subjects and theme. This, he says, is an intentional approach to not restrict his craft to a certain kind of movies. “I think, my thing in life is to try to be as versatile as possible.” “So you get an opportunity to immerse yourself in the new world and one has to unlearn a lot. I think it would be very arrogant of me to keep repeating the same thing...

something I see is happening a lot. I don’t have a set formula to make films. I somehow, don’t belong to that school of thoughts where you keep repeating yourself,” he says. He also feels that Fitoor is a confluence of people from different backgrounds and putting their creative energies together to unravel darkest side of love.

“Aditya and Katrina are sexy looking people and they are from the mainstream space. But what makes the film interesting is that we have Tabu on board. She comes from an art house space kind of cinema and all three of them are on board for a commercial film. There is a thin line between the commercial and arty zone and I have tried to walk the middle path and create a platform where these two worlds collide,” he says.