Ram Gopal Varma critiques Indian filmmakers, praises ‘Mission Impossible’ for respecting audience intelligence

Director Ram Gopal Varma praises Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and criticized Indian filmmakers for underestimating audiences. He says foreign filmmakers uplift viewer intelligence, while Indian films often cater to and amplify perceived dumbness among audiences

Chennai: Director Ram Gopal Varma on Sunday said that the difference between foreign filmmakers and the filmmakers here was that while the former “assumed” the audience to be intelligent and looked to further push their intelligence up, filmmakers here assumed the audience to be dumb and look to “push their dumbness further down”.

The director, who is known to be vocal when it comes to expressing his thoughts on issues, took to X to pen a post on Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning.

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Soon after watching the film, Ram Gopal Varma put out a tweet saying, “Just saw #MissionImpossibleTheFinalReckoning and it’s MindFuckkaBlowing ! The BEST of the FRANCHISE.”

He followed up that tweet with another one, seeking to compare the mindsets of filmmakers here with that of their foreign counterparts. Interestingly, while he cited Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning as an example of a film that looked to push up the intelligence of its audience, he left blank, the space for the name of a film that he thought made audiences dumber.

He wrote,”The difference between them and us is they assume the audience to be intelligent and push their intelligence further up, by making films like #MissionImpossibleTheFinalReckoning. On the contrary we assume the audience to be dumb and we push their dumbness further down in the hope of even reaching the dumbest of the audience by making films like ____________.”

It may be recalled that director Ram Gopal Varma had, some time ago, penned a note of confession to himself in which he expressed regret for having failed to set his film ‘Sathya’ as the benchmark for all his films.

In the note, he had promised that every film that he made henceforth would be made with a reverence towards why he wanted to become a director in the first place and announced his next film called ‘Syndicate’.

Ram Gopal Varma said that he had taken a vow to wash away all his cinema sins that he had committed over the past few years, with just this one single film called ‘Syndicate’.