Madhur Bhandarkar on how Chandni Bar was criticised.

In Bollywood, bigger stars often mean bigger money. But filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar believes that budgets should follow the story, not the scale of fame attached to it. Looking back at his career, the director has often pointed out how dramatically budgets can change from one film to another — even within his own filmography. One of his most striking comparisons came when he spoke about the gap between his early, raw cinema and his later, more glamorous films.

A comparison that says it all

Talking about the making of Chandni Bar (2001), Madhur Bhandarkar once revealed just how modest the budget of the National Award-winning film really was. The director compared it to the scale of his 2012 film Heroine, which starred Kareena Kapoor.

“I made the movie (Chandni Bar) on a very small budget. So much so, that I once jokingly told Kareena (Kapoor) that I had made Chandni Bar on a budget that was smaller than what I spent on her clothes in Heroine (laughs),”

Why Chandni Bar struggled to get backing

Bhandarkar later explained that Chandni Bar was difficult to mount because he wasn’t an established filmmaker at the time. His debut film Trishakti (1999), starring Arshad Warsi, did not perform well at the box office, making producers cautious.

“When I approached producers for it, they wanted me to put some item numbers in the film, which I didn’t want to. My first film did not work, so there was a lot of pressure on me, but I was hell-bent on making the film the way I wanted to.”

He added that resistance came from unexpected quarters, even over the film’s name.

“It was very risky. People even had a problem with the title of the film. Many thought it was very cheap, and a B-grade title. I researched the film for about six months.”

Defending the budget comparison

In a 2011 op-ed for The Times of India, Bhandarkar addressed the comparison again, clarifying that he was not being dismissive or mocking. He argued that the nature of a story decides how much money it needs.

Chandni Bar was set in Mumbai’s red-light area and followed the life of a bar dancer, while Heroine focused on the inner workings of the Hindi film industry — a space that naturally requires glamour, scale and visibility.

Low budgets, strong returns

Bhandarkar has often maintained that high budgets do not guarantee success. Along with Chandni Bar, he pointed out that films like Page 3 (2005), Corporate (2006), Traffic Signal (2007) and Jail (2009) were all made on controlled budgets and still delivered strong critical reception and returns. At the same time, he acknowledged that films such as Dil Toh Bacha Hai Ji (2011) and Heroine would naturally require more money because they were driven by bigger stars and glossy settings.

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