Dibakar Banerjee on LSD 2 and why he is scared of online trolling

Dibakar Banerjee and Ektaa Kapoor are coming back with the second part of their film ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’ (LSD), which went on to become a sleeper hit. The first part of this anthology was released in 2010. The director has gone a step ahead in the second part and has cast all new actors in this adult film. ‘LSD 2’, as the name suggests, promises to be a more in-your-face reality inspired drama. Dibakar introduced his stars during the trailer launch, which consists of Bonita Rajpurohit, a real transwoman; Paritosh Tiwari, who is playing a girl in the film; Abhinav Singh, and others.

Dibakar revealed that getting a certificate for this bold film was not a tough task. Speaking about it, he said, “Very surprisingly, for ‘LSD 2’ the censor process was very smooth. We wanted to apply for A certificate, we thought about what is possible and permissible. All they asked for was to mute the cuss words related to mother and the sister; then I asked them if I could turn it towards the father? But they refused, saying that the family should be kept out. There is a lot of frontal nudity in the climax of the film, which we had to blur out because you can’t show frontal nudity in Indian films.”

The film shows how social media has trapped everyone with the pressure of increasing followers or likes, which ultimately boils down to a numbers game. Dibakar, who interestingly chooses to stay away from social media, said, “I think when I talk about numbers in the film, we are talking about quantity, which means that value has become quantitative. Therefore, quality and quantity are two different things. We are looking at quality in quantity. We are looking at how many (likes/ followers) and ignoring what we have (likes/ followers). So, in that chase of how many, when we run behind it as against kya hai ke peeche bhagna.”

The director, who is known to speak his mind, feels that the film’s performance is completely dependent on the audience’s reaction. However, he says nowadays what is more scary is online trolling and said, “The thing which we all are afraid of is the troll army. In the films, a 13-year-old is getting murder, a girl is getting raped and in a reality show someone is getting slapped – we call such behaviour bad. While showing bad, sometimes the question is raised why you are showing bad things on screen, but I have not shown things out of my imagination. It has happened, so I have shown it in my film. Then people say no, you can’t show what bad things are happening around us. That is the reason we are scared.”

‘LSD 1’, starring Rajkummar Rao, Nushrat Bharucha, Anshuman Jha, Neha Chauhan, Amit Sial and others released on March 19, 2010, and the next instalment of the film is releasing on April 19, 2024.