20th anniversary EXCLUSIVE: Madhur Bhandarkar says corporate booking, in a healthy manner, began with Corporate: "Half-day was declared in some offices; employees were encouraged to watch the film"; reveals, "Many people STOPPED consuming soft drinks after watching it!"

Corporate (2006) completed 20 years on July 7 and it’s a film that Madhur Bhandarkar considers his favourite. Starring Bipasha Basu, Kay Kay Menon, Raj Babbar and Rajat Kapoor, the film was loved for its subject, shocking climax, performances, music, etc. Despite dealing with the complex worlds of corporate business and the stock market, the narrative was easy to understand, an aspect that was widely praised by audiences and critics alike. On Corporate’s 20th anniversary, Madhur Bhandarkar went down memory lane and shared fascinating trivia. You had made Page 3 (2005) and it was a sleeper-hit. What made you make a film on the corporate world at that stage? Corporate was a film which was ahead of its time. It was a very different world for me. I didn’t have a story. The title fascinated me and I decided to make Corporate, obviously based on the corporate world. I collaborated with writer Manoj Tyagi, who had written Satta (2003) and Page 3 with me. He was an MBA guy and had a lot of kn...

Hugh Hudson: smash-hit pop classic Chariots of Fire director was a hero of British film

Hudson brought an ad-man’s eye to the brilliant 1981 drama about athletics and bigotry, as well as directing the hilarious Cinzano commercials

As the 1980s dawned, British ad director Hugh Hudson took on his first feature film and made it a legendary hit: an inspirational story which supplied a sugar-rush of patriotism and a swoon of nostalgia which hit the spot both sides of the Atlantic. It somehow brought off the trick of being about the underdog and the victim of bigotry and religious discrimination – and yet also being a resounding endorsement of the status quo which could, on grounds of decency and meritocracy, always accommodate the outsider. This was the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the ethos of success for the hardworking and the deserving.

The film of course was Chariots of Fire, the true story of the 1924 Olympic runners Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross), a Jew who ran to defy prejudice, and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a devout Christian who found a creationist glory in his speed. It was the destiny of so many involved to be forever associated chiefly, or solely, with this smash-hit pop classic: certainly Cross and Charleson never again found roles to match Abrahams and Liddell. And maybe Hudson himself never again had a triumph like it: though he was no one-hit wonder, later directing the Oscar-winning Tarzan drama Greystoke, and later Revolution, an epic about the American revolution starring Al Pacino which was derided but then grew in acclaim, giving his Hudson his own misunderstood masterpiece moment.

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