Honesty is the best policy for director Dibakar Banerjee; both in his films and in life. The filmmaker, who is known for National Award-winning productions such as Khosla ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! admits that his latest, LSD 2, wasn’t an easy film to make, particularly because of how accurately it describes the uncomfortable realities of today. Under the umbrella of love, sex and dhokha (betrayal), the film touches upon issues of social media dependency, continued discomfort over different sexualities, increased surveillance among others.
“Every other day we put out our lives on the internet, but what we are showing the world is a different life. And in this duality there is a silent darkness. I wanted to show this darkness,” he says, adding, “If you cannot speak about it, then there will be silence and that is not good for a civil society, which is why we have to talk openly.”
That was one of the reasons why he couldn’t cast established names for the film. LSD 2 comes 14 years after the first instalment that had three interlinked narratives—honour killing, an MMS scandal and sting operations. Like its predecessor, the new film also stars fresh faces—Nimrit Kaur Ahluwalia and Anupam Joardar. There’s also Mouni Roy, Swastika Mukherjee and Tusshar Kapoor. “Most established actors are afraid to do such films because it may harm their brand image.
I needed someone to play an 18-year-old gamer, who is constantly using cuss words. Who in Bollywood would agree to do that? They would say that they are not comfortable. Then the hypocrisy becomes visible. With a film like this, you can’t be a hypocrite,” Banerjee says.
Interestingly, he never had plans for an LSD sequel. It was on producer Ektaa Kapoor’s insistence that he decided to even think about it. “Over the last decade and a half, I realised I had so much masala to make a film,” he says, adding that the passage of time also allowed him to upgrade technologically. LSD 2 uses a lot of new techniques, including motion capture, animation and deep fake. The sequel also gave him an opportunity to incorporate elements he had been accused of missing out on in the first film. “I had gone to a party once and a person had mentioned how LSD neither had sex nor love. It was only dhokha. So, I made sure that LSD 2 had everything,” he recalls.
Being bold, however, comes with a cost. Creative people have been trying to outrun censorship since time immemorial. Banerjee’s experience with LSD was not very different, but the sequel has managed to come out mostly unscathed. “The first film had gone through censorship issues but fortunately this one didn’t have many cuts. They said no to the cuss words, so we just mute such scenes. One of the actors has been shown completely nude in the climax. Our laws say we can’t show frontal nudity. So we simply blurred the scenes,” the director reveals. Evidently, Banerjee likes to keep things real.
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