Rahul Dev on film remakes: I’ve worked in all four languages down south and can safely say..

Present day Bollywood is witnessing a number of remakes make their way onto the silver screen. After recent releases like HIT: The First Case and Good Luck Jerry, cinephiles are anxiously awaiting the release of Pushkar-Gayatri’s Hindi remake of their 2017 film, Vikram Vedha, which is scheduled to hit theatres on September 30. The debate about remakes has been going on for a while now, and actor Rahul Dev recently gave his two cents about what he thought of them.

In conversation with ETimes, Dev said that he believed the phenomena of remakes would continue despite the emergence of more pan Indian films these days. According to Dev, there was a difference between watching a film in a language the audiences were familiar with actors they knew, versus watching a dubbed version.

Speaking of how the South Indian film industry were also separated into four different languages, Dev said “I have worked in all four languages down south and can safely say that each region has a set of actors or stars that have their own unique following in the same manner as the Hindi-speaking audiences have their own actors or stars they follow”.

On the success of regional films among Hindi speaking audiences, Dev spoke of how the filmmakers spent a lot of time fleshing out the narrative, which is one of the most important parts of a film. Audiences were attracted to stories they could identify with, irrespective of whether they included larger than life characters or not.

The actor opened up about his thoughts on nepotism in Bollywood as well, saying that he never felt that his success was hindered by actors who came from a film background. Dev cited examples of stars like Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Vinod Khanna, Rajesh Khanna, Shatrughan Sinha Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khans, and Akshay Kumar, all of whom entered the film industry as outsiders. But they cemented a place as some of the biggest success stories in Bollywood.