In a recent interview with Bombay Times, Shahid shared his experience with the world of Bollywood. He started off by saying that he grew up on films that had stories, which people barely focus on nowadays. ‘There was originality and there were well-fleshed out stories,’ he said. He also added that he watched a lot of his father, Pankaj Kapur’s works, and his mother, Neelima, was a classical dancer and he had immense exposure to the exponents of classical dance and music because of her. “I absorbed and assimilated these things in my system and they subconsciously have shaped my thinking in many ways,” he shared. He also revealed that he grew up on a lot of cinema that was made in India and watched movies that featured Amitabh Bachchan, Dilip Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, and so on.
From there on, he gave his opinion on Hindi cinema and its evolvement. He said, “The thing is that cinema in our country has gone through several phases of its own. You make what the audience wants to see but as a creative thinker and as an artiste, you also want them to see your version of a story.” He added that there were fewer films made with that kind of freedom of thought and these movies were freed from the boundaries or set limits that most other films followed or adhered to. He also expressed that there was a strict measurement of what could be made. “While it had a lot to do with what the audience wanted to watch, it also had a lot to do with the fear of trying something new. When people do that, they limit themselves and the audience,” he said. He is of the opinion that without experiencing something, you cannot expect whether the audience will like something or not since they aren’t presented with the choice.
Talking about the time when he stepped foot as a professional in the industry, Shahid said, “When I came into the business, the kind of content I was naturally more drawn to was seen as risky. Gradually, of course, I worked in films like Haider, Udta Punjab, Kaminey, Jab We Met which were closer to the kind of cinema I liked as an artiste.”