Milap Zaveri on Satyameva Jayate 2 failure: I learnt who are my real friends in the industry after it didn’t work

Filmmaker Milap Zaveri’s last release, Satyameva Jayate 2 was a disappointment at the box office, failing to garner good numbers. And on the first anniversary of it’s release, he took to Instagram to share a lengthy note about life after a film doesn’t work.

Talking to us, he says a film failing is like the ‘death of a baby’. “You are heartbroken, the project is like your child, something which you nurture. In the initial period, you feel very low and sad,” he confesses.

He adds that one gets to know who their real friends and well wishers are during low phases like his. Zaveri tells us, “I came to know who my real friends are. When you succeed, everybody is your friend and well-wisher. But people who are with you at that point of time, when you fail, if they keep supporting you, they are the true people in your life. Even failure has a positive side and silver lining, you come to know who matters in your life, and who you matter to. That’s the rule of life in any profession anywhere in the world, success is always embraced. When you fail, you take that person for granted.”

He counts actor-couple Riteish Deshmukh and Genelia D’Souza, actor Shaad Randhawa, producer Bhushan Kumar and actor Manoj Bajpayee as those who stood by him in the past year.

Filmmaking is always a collaborative process, with multiple people involved at every stage. Why did he accept full responsibility for SJ 2’s failure? He says, “Eventually, I am the captain of the ship. The screenplay, story and dialogues were mine. I was the director, and the technicians work according to the vision of the director. It was my conviction, and my zone as it was a genre I had succeeded before in in Satyameva Jayate (2018) and Marjaavaan (2019). Obviously everyone trusted me, right from the producers to actors. I had a lot of say in every decision.”

But when a film does well, actors get all the credit, and when it doesn’t, the blame is pinned on the director mostly. What does he have to say about that? Zaveri says, “SJ and Marjaavaan worked, and I was fortunate enough to get credit for both. Obviously John and Manoj were the huge draw, people came to see the film because of them. Sidharth Malhotra didn’t have a hit years before Marjaavaan, it remains his highest grosser in the last seven years. He always gave me credit. Now when SJ 2 has failed, John gave an interview ‘I cannot blame Milap for it, I did the film knowing what I did, he is a great person’.”