“The Mahabharata”, interview with producer Simon Brook

At the 81th Venice Film Festival, Fred Film Radio interviewed the director and producer Simon Brook to talk about the restoration in 8K of Peter Brook‘s epic film adaptation of “The Mahabharata” 35 years after its original debut at the Festival.

A very complex and expensive process

How complex was it for Simon Brook to get “The Mahabharata” restored? What did him have to fight against? “It had not been shown in movie theaters for really many years and I couldn’t figure out why. My father would say to me: ‘Could you ask the producer why the film isn’t being shown?’. But we never really got a satisfactory answer. And then a few years ago the producer died and I thought: ‘Wwell, let me see if I can’t buy the film back from his estate’.And that was the beginning of an epic journey that was like the Odyssey or something, where I had to firstly sort out all of the legal situation on the rights and the copyright holders and things like that. And then there was a second one, which is actually the film had been put up as collateral by the producer, along with 12 of his other films and two that he was in development, against a bank loan that he’d never repaid. And so the bank had actually resold that debt to another bank, had resold it to another bank. And you know, I’m a filmmaker, I’m not a bank finance lawyer or whatever. So it was a very complex and expensive process that involved really lawsuits and threats. And many times I thought this isn’t going to happen. There’s also 2025 is the 100th anniversary of my father’s birth. And one of the things I wanted to do is to be able to present the film around the world as part of that commemoration and celebration”.

A story tragically relevant today

35 years have passed since the release of “The Mahabharata” which is now restored in 8k version. But what is Simon Brook expecting for the future of the film? “I think it’s an extraordinary story that is particularly relevant to teenagers. Because it ask the questions that any teenager has asked themselves. How do you live your life, your relationships, friendship, enemy, love, how do you do this? And all of the torments of the teenage years are very much things that actually are going on between the adults in Mahabharata. I think it’s tragically relevant today, more relevant maybe than ever in its thousands of years of existence. But it’s speaking about the problems the world is facing right now, which are cousins killing cousins, brothers killing brothers, the destruction of the earth, the earth rebelling, the overpopulation of the planet, catastrophic climate change, these are all things that trigger Mahabharata, but it’s not a depressing movie.

It’s showing that actually these are very complex issues that have to be approached in a non-binary, black and white way. But you can’t say someone is just good or bad, or this is evil, it’s all very, very complex. And I think the world that we’ve been living in has been leading us more and more into a simplification of thought, simplification of concepts, simplification of communication, X being a prime example of it. The soundbite world has replaced the thinking about the complexity of the issues. And the Mahabharata brings us back to that fundamental truth which is that you can’t divide everything into left and right, black and white, good and bad. It is a very complex world we live in and we have to accept that. And it’s what makes it so fascinating and interesting and great to be alive. We shouldn’t be afraid of this”.

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