Director Omung Kumar on the failure of Sanjay Dutt’s comeback film Bhoomi: It dampened my spirit

Filmmaker Omung Kumar’s 2014 film, Mary Kom, was a success. His next, Sarbjit (2016) received a mixed response, but failure happened with the film that followed. There was a strong buzz around Bhoomi, the comeback film of actor Sanjay Dutt (after his jail term), but it bombed at the box office, and it “dampened” Omung’s spirits.

Looking back, the director, who’s now prepping for his next film, shares, “People who saw it loved it, but the number of people who went to the theatres was less.” Omung knows it’s important to move on. “You figure out what went wrong and you make sure that it doesn’t happen again. I’m just three movies old and I’ve never assisted anyone before. This is a new phase of my life and I love what I do,” he says.

Delving deeper into what could have gone wrong with his revenge drama centered on rape, the 50-year-old adds, “Till the fight sequence everything was real good and then maybe it went a little off. If you shred into the details then, maybe there were lots of films about rape coming out around it and the timing wasn’t right.”

After the box office result, there were reports about trouble between Omung and Sanjay. He clears that it was all wrong. “We saw Sanju (a biopic on Sanjay Dutt that released recently) together, and everything is fine.”

Looking forward, Omung is now working on Yubi Lakpi, a film based on the sport in Manipur. “It is played with seven sides, bare chest with coconut. So, people from Manipur believe that [the international game of] rugby is inspired from their sport. Basically, the story is from India to London, so it is a bigger story here,” he signs off.

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First Published: Aug 10, 2018 17:17 IST