Sanjay Leela Bhansali Talks ‘Padmaavat’ Trauma, ‘Devdas’ Cannes Triumph as he Reflects on a 25-Year Career (EXCLUSIVE)
Naman Ramachandran Indian film director Sanjay Leela Bhansali has seen it all – from being physically attacked on the sets of “Padmaavat” to walking the red carpet at a triumphant Cannes screening of “Devdas” – in his 25 years of filmmaking.A graduate of the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India, in Pune, Bhansali equally consumed the oeuvre of Tarkovsky, Uday Shankar’s “Kalpana” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “One From the Heart.” While he could not fathom the Russian auteur’s work in its entirety, “something about how a visual works on the soul of the audience if it’s receiving correctly, and the power of the images, is what I imbibed more than anything else,” Bhansali told Variety.These days, striking imagery and grand