Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma on Thursday said Satya’s cult status serves as a lesson on how the narrative and the authenticity of characters drive a film’s success, taking a dig at the alleged obsession with “massive budgets”, “expensive VFX” and star power in the film industry.
The statement came ahead of the 1998 crime drama Satya’s re-release in Indian theatres on January 17.
“On the occasion of the re-release of Satya on Jan 17th 2025, here’s both an introspection and a confession...Satya was made by honest instincts and not by clever design, and the cult status it achieved should be a wakeup call for all film makers present and future including us, its original makers. When the whole industry right now is in a mad rush in their requisitions for massive budgets, expensive VFX , gargantuan sets and superstars, it might be prudent for all of us to take a hard relook at Satya and give a deep thought to why it became such a big blockbuster minus any of those above mentioned requisites," wrote Ram Gopal Varma on X, noting how the film was made without any meticulous planning.
“Satya was a film which me and all involved mostly made it without having a clue about what we were making except for a real gut instinct on the subject matter,” asserted the 62-year-old director.
Varma also stated that the cast and crew became aware of their ‘talents’ only after the film was made. So, in a way, they did not make the film; instead, the film made them. “We never had a script but strangely enough we were all being very true and honest to what we were shooting each day. And then with the final outcome of what we made, we were as much shocked as the audience...I go back to my line that no parents can know what their child will become when he grows up,” he wrote.
Varma added that he drew the characters from real life and that it is the film’s stark verisimilitude which makes it impossible to “repeat the magic of Satya”.
“I don’t remember a single time any of us discussing, whether Satya will work at the box office but we all seriously wanted it to work for us,” said Varma in his note.
The director reflected on how the film’s narrative resonated with him because it was not about any particular section of the society but spoke to all human beings.
“The only time I realised that there is something really special about Satya is on the last day of mixing, when I saw most of the characters, I created with so much love being killed like dogs...Not that I din’t know that before, but to see it in a flow along with music and sound stirred something deep in me...I got choked and had tears in my eyes which prompted me to put a super at the end of the film, ‘My tears for Satya are as much as for those, who he killed’. The point is whether one is a gangster or a cop or a common man, underneath all of them is a human being,” Varma concluded.
Satya, the first instalment of Varma's Gangster trilogy about organised crime in India, stars Manoj Bajpayee, J.D. Chakravarthy, Aditya Shrivastava and Paresh Rawal in key roles. Written by Saurabh Shukla and Anurag Kashyap, the film follows Satya (Chakravarthy), an immigrant who arrives in Mumbai seeking employment. After Satya befriends Bhiku Mhatre (Manoj), he becomes embroiled in the city's underworld.
Released on July 3, 1998, Satya went on to win a National Film Award. It inspired several other crime dramas like Company (2002) and D (2005) and a direct sequel Satya 2 (2013).