Australian director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet), well-known Indophile, was absolutely smitten by the jaw-dropping Raj Mandir Cinema in Jaipur, as well as its audience, I read somewhere long ago. If memory serves right, he said something like this: “It is an ice cream palace of a cinema. All the audience was thoroughly engaged with the film—they were talking, laughing, clapping, singing, whistling, talking on their mobile phones… It was a seminal moment in my understanding of cinema. I tried to recreate that interactivity with film in my Moulin Rouge.” I was gobsmacked to read this. 

“Indian musicals have inspired me since the first time I’ve been here,” Luhrmann told the Hindustan Times in 2010. “I had that cathartic experience 15 years ago, when I was here working on Shakespeare and watching a Bollywood movie, and it felt the same… [In Bollywood films] there’s tragedy, then comedy and next is music, which is just like Shakespeare’s works. It reached me as an idea that the old form was alive in Bollywood, and that we brought to the [fore]ground in Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge.”