Mumbai: Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma on Wednesday opened up about his upcoming movie ‘Arnab-The News Prostitute’, which is based on the controversial news anchor and editor-in-chief of Republic TV Arnab Goswami. He said that his project is going to deal with the aspect where the reportage starts influencing people.
RGV announced the film in August last when he expressed his anger towards Arnab Goswami’s reporting and criticizing Bollywood and the way the industry functions.
And now in an interview with The Quint, RGV spoke about his intentions behind coming up with a film on Arnab. When asked about why that particular idea came to him, the filmmaker replied saying, “For me Arnab is an example of what the future of the news media is going to be.”
RGV further said, “We talk about freedom of press; I don’t think we expected someone like Arnab will come along. There’s a very thin line between reporting the news and influencing the minds of the people with probably what’s not true.”
‘So, my film is going to deal with this aspect – where the reportage starts influencing people. If news media is going for trial by media, they become the judge, they become the investigator… I think that defeats the purpose of any kind of a process,” he stated.
After the sudden demise of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, there has been a lot of debate around the functioning of Bollywood. Several news channels have also been holding debates on the demise of SSR and the drugs case in the industry. RGV was among many celebrities who came out in the support of industry amidst all these events.
In one his tweets in August RGV announced the film and said, Varma then announced his film based on Arnab Goswami. “ARNAB”THE NEWS PROSTITUTE. After extensively studying him I mulled on whether the tagline should be The News Pimp or The News Prostitute though both are relevant I finally settled on prostitute for its sound. I know I used some hard language in these tweets to describe him but I took a cue of them from our very own dirty mouthed #ArnabGoswamy.”
He further spoke about Arnab reacting to his film, “Hey #ArnabGoswami whether u react to my film or not I don’t care a damn because my target audience is not going to be u , but it will be ur viewers ..I want to shake them up with the way I will expose in my film the back of ur public face in Republic TV.”
Calling Arnab as ‘villain’, RGV also asked fellow directors and celebrities, Karan Johar, Shah Rukh Khan, Aditya Chopra, etc. to not stay silent but rather call out the new anchor’s ‘false’ statements and reporting.