Anupama Chopra on dealing with backlash: ‘Just don't read the comments’

She’s had a life-long affair with cinema. Her mother is the veteran screenwriter Kamna Chandra, her sister director Tanuja Chandra and her husband filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra. 

Anupama Chopra has been reporting and writing from Hindi cinema’s frontlines since 1993. In the last three decades, she has worked across print, television and digital for legacy media outlets such as India Today, NDTV 24/7 and Star World. She founded Film Companion in 2014 and has been with The Hollywood Reporter India since 2024.

One of the most famous faces of film criticism in India, she has written several books on movies and the people who make the magic happen. Some of her most notable titles include Sholay: The Making of a Classic (2000), King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema (2007) and First Day First Show: Writings from the Bollywood Trenches (2011).

She was at the recently-concluded 19th edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival for her new book Dining with the Stars: Indian Superstars in their Own Words which does the invaluable work of bringing together and archiving her talks with celebrities such as Sushant Singh Rajput, Mohan Lal, Payal Kapadia and Irrfan Khan.

In this exclusive interview, she talks about her enduring love for movies, how she deals with backlash, why she will never write fiction, and more.

At a time when YouTube videos are doing so well, why make a book out of your interviews?

Good question. I thought about this for a while, but I think it's important in terms of shelf life, because I love YouTube, my whole professional life is on YouTube. But the truth is, things get lost, because there is so much out there.

When you have these interviews in a book one after the other, when you read Shah Rukh Khan and then Diljit Dosanjh followed by somebody like Fahadh Faasil, it gives you a portrait of a time and a place in the Indian film industry, which to me is very interesting and very important, because Indian cinema still is so bad at archiving, everything just gets lost. So a book like this has immense value in that sense.

Will you ever write fiction or a book that’s not about movie stars or films?

No. I don't know anything apart from the movies, I don't know anything else. As for fiction, I would never dare, because my brother, he's Vikram Chandra, so we have one great fiction writer in the family already. I will never ever match up to him. So it’s better to stick to what I know. For me, movies drive everything. I write books because they're about movies, not because I want to write books.

People no longer treat reviews as opinions, there's backlash on everything. Do you still think you have the best job ever?

I do, because you get to engage, and honestly, I've thought so many times that I should just stop. Because what's the need really? I've done this long enough, I've done it all. But when I see a movie, all I want to do is go out and tell someone about it. It’s such a part of my DNA that if you want to hit me, hit me, but I will talk.

What keeps you going even after so many years?

I just love it. I'm so excited about it. I'm excited to go to work each morning, see the next film, and do the next interview. It just doesn't get boring. I don't go into it with cynicism or thinking that I'm some expert. Because I'm not. I'm a student and I keep learning. One of my colleagues calls it toxic optimism and my son thinks I’m incessantly annoyingly positive. But that's just how I'm built.

But it doesn't come easy. It takes a lot of work.

It takes work, but if you love it, you just have to keep doing it. What I've understood is, just don't read the comments. My mantra is host and ghost. If you don't read the comments, they can't get to you, and if they can't get to you, you just keep doing your work. Keep your head down, keep working.

What are the three things that you think anybody wanting to write about films should keep in mind? 

You have to come from a place of love for the movies. You can't become jaded or cynical. You can't watch 50 bad films and think the next will also be bad. You need to love films enough to watch and process movies of every kind. That's very important.

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The second is you have to watch a lot of movies. Keep watching. My greatest insecurity is that I don't watch enough. I want to watch one movie a day. That's what a great critic should be doing.

So you have to love it, you have to watch a lot and read other great critics you like. I'm constantly reading people I admire because I want to be better. I think all these three are very important.

In all your time talking to movie stars, what do you think is the one thing that’s the most misunderstood about them?

They're more wonderful than we think they are. We look at them and see so much fame, money and attention. But inside is a person who is misunderstood and has some insecurity because it's so hard to retain success. You can get there but can you stay there? This becomes a haunting question that eats into everyone's insides. It shouldn't, but it does.