“Writers are the farmers of Bollywood”: Siddharth and Garima on unfair practices against writers | Exclusive
Filmmaker duo Siddharth Singh and Garima Wahal, known as Siddharth-Garima, liken Bollywood writers to farmers who feed the industry but face neglect and exploitation.During their recent visit to Pune for the Mumba International Film Festival, where their film Dukaan won Best Film, the duo opened up about the lack of recognition, payment issues, and credit hogging that plague screenwriters.
Q. Your journey in the industry has been remarkable—from lyricists to writers and now directors. Do you feel writers are finally getting the recognition they deserve?
Garima: The writers have not got their due! On that note, I would say that writers are like the farmers of this industry. We hear about farmer suicides because we, as a country, are extremely unfair to people who feed us. Similarly, the entertainment industry, be it TV or films, or OTT, is run by the writers. What is the butt of a script without the writers? A blank page! And not everyone is capable of filling that blank page beautifully and making it make sense on the big screen. Writers are the ones who are giving us that, and yet we are killing them. Forget respect, we are not even paying them for the hard work, and credit is a different story. Some writers have made a home in different camps, and they are still flourishing.
Siddharth: You might know who is starring in the film, who made the film, but how often are you aware of who wrote the film? A producer should include their writers in events and promotions around the film, the trailer launches, and more. I challenge you to open any song, and check the main description of the song without digging deep, you will rarely ever find out who the lyricist is.Garima: Screenwriters’ should be called filmmakers. There are many different kinds of writers: a novelist, a journalist, a blog writer, and every writer has their own perks. Writing for films is equivalent to ‘riding a tiger.’Siddharth: Payment for a writer is another big issue, because writers are the first ones to be hired for a project. At the time, there was no actor, no studio, no director, so no one to pay. Just 10% of the signing amount is paid, and then they have no clue when the remainder of the amount is going to come.Garima: It is designed to make a writer starve. The fee is divided into so many installments that they never get the full amount. However, there are very few producers and production houses that are fair enough to pay you by the time the filming has come to an end.A major problem that writers are facing these days is directors who cannot write, but love hogging credits. They talk as if they are the main writers, saying, ‘you know, when I was writing the film with my writers.’ What do they mean they were writing? They did not put their pens to the paper. It should have been ‘my writers were writing, and I was listening to them.’ But every director loves saying, “I wrote this.”Siddharth: Often in credits, you will see “Written and directed by ‘so and so’” and different credits to individuals for “screenplay,” “story,” and “dialogues.” So if there are people for who have written screenplay, script, and dialogues, then what did that director write?
