Some filmmakers achieve success in conventional ways, while others take a more innovative approach that can quietly change the way that filmmaking is accomplished. Ram Gopal Varma belongs to the latter group and then, almost as abruptly, seemed to step away from the very industry he helped reshape.
In order to fully appreciate how Varma accomplished this, one must go back to the beginning of his success.
With “Rangeela”, Varma didn’t just make a hit; he changed the texture of mainstream Hindi cinema. The film created a more modern visual and auditory impression than had ever previously been seen in Bollywood. By replacing the “staged” impression associated with Mumbai, Rangeela’s characters sounded and acted like ordinary people. At that time, when Bollywood was still figuring out style and substance, Varma’s film met both.
Then came “Satya” – arguably the moment everything shifted. Prior to Satya, there were several films that depicted crime and criminals in Hindi cinema; however, none of them did so in the same way that this film did. Varma’s Satya was graphic; its characters (and how they acted) were realistic, and the film’s story depicted the power dynamics of the street in a manner that would seem to indicate that it was based on real events. The film did not feel written; it felt observed, and it did not just influence audiences but created filmmakers.
He topped that off with “Company”, which took the gangster genre and expanded it globally, yet kept it true to its Indian roots. It is a much sleeker, ditto-controlled, more surgical piece of storytelling than “Satya”. He built a new language for all future films with these two movies.
What happened to RGV after these films?
The answer to that question makes for a very interesting and pretty uncomfortable discussion. He did not just fade away, but he made tons of films after that, but the precision, restraint, and sharpness of the earlier films were fading away and becoming much more erratic and impulsive than before. It was as if the same filmmaker who once rewrote the rules had decided he no longer needed them at all.
One way to look at it is decline. Another way, and perhaps a more honest one, is detachment. Varma never seemed interested in sustaining a legacy the way the industry expects you to. There was no visible attempt to protect his brand, no careful curation of projects to maintain stature. If anything, he moved in the opposite direction – towards experimentation, speed, and sometimes, chaos.
Maybe he didn’t walk away from Bollywood in the physical sense. Maybe he just stopped engaging with what it had become. The industry has changed away from what he created and still maintains today; the earlier films by Ram Gopal Varma disrupted the industry’s trend toward polished, packaged, and predictable films, which he could not work with or thrive in because of their predictable nature.
The legacy of “Satya” and “Company” remains alive in many ways, and many crime dramas/movies and series still utilize Varma’s sense of realism, character development, and the subsequent way he understood power dynamics; thus, his influence is everywhere, even when his presence isn’t.
That’s the strange thing about Ram Gopal Varma.
He didn’t just change Bollywood. He changed it so deeply that it moved on without needing him in the same way, and perhaps, he was okay with that. Or perhaps, he had already moved on first.
