Actor Vishal opens up about negative movie reviews

Behindwoods recently had an exclusive interview with Vishal, ahead of Thupparivaalan's release, in which he disclosed about his opinions on movie reviews and its impact.

He said, "Everything has pros and cons. This is a new age of journalism, like the new age of filmmakers. These days, you don't find many debut directors, who come to make films after assisting a reputed director. They directly enter movies, once they complete a couple of short films and gain experience. Likewise, anyone today is a movie reviewer now. There are few real journalists, who studied journalism and chose this profession. Anyone who has a camera and can talk is not journalists. You can't talk about a film in front of the camera and monetize it on YouTube. You are not doing it as a hobby; you have movie poster ads on the back of your reviews (video), and it is for money. Our own industry's producers are also to be blamed for that. When a film is being bashed in a review, the ad of next week's releases are also seen. So, it has to be worked upon.

If you want to kill the film through the review, go for it. If you want to stop killing, good then, it is up to you. To be frank, you shouldn't have a film's poster on the back side of you, in your review. It is a copyright infringement, and that will be our next move. You can review any film, but you can't have the poster without the consent of the producer. But, yeah, we cannot stop reviews. It is a free world, and anyone can say anything today. If someone wishes to watch a film, he/she would definitely watch it, irrespective of its bad reviews.

But there is a way to review a film, and that should be taken care of. If something doesn't work in the film, you can put it on a subtle tone, instead of bashing it. Communication skills are very important for reviewing.

As like the practice in Hollywood, we've started Test reviews here too, with my film Thupparivaalan. Excluding reviewers, a particular set of people, comprising of say, college students, auto drivers, and various other professions, would be made to watch the film together much before its release. With the help of this test review, we have edited out two minutes from Thupparivaalan, as they felt it had a lag. So, everyone should be okay with it and agree to any kind of criticism."