\n<\/p>\n
In the small Bombay theater that showed big films, his father brought him \u2014 over and over again \u2014 to see the biggest of them all.<\/p>\n
With every one of his 18 viewings of \u201cMughal-e-Azam,\u201d a hit 1960 musical about a forbidden romance between a prince and a courtesan, the young boy fell more in love. The rays of light, beamed in black and white, opened to him a world at once majestic and lost. The dialogue, crisp and poetic, lingered in his thoughts. The music swept him to places that only later in life would he fully understand.<\/p>\n
Bombay would eventually change, to Mumbai. India, cinema and music \u2014 they would all change, too. But more than half a century later, Sanjay Leela Bhansali \u2014 now 61 and a rare remaining master of the grand old style of Indian filmmaking \u2014 has not let go of his seat at that small cinema, Alankar Talkies, on the hem of the city\u2019s red-light district.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
His mind remains rooted there even as his work moves beyond the theater walls. His latest project, released on Wednesday, is an eight-episode musical drama on Netflix that gives a \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d treatment to an exalted milieu of courtesans in pre-independence India.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The show, \u201cHeeramandi,\u201d affords more space for Mr. Bhansali\u2019s expansive and exacting approach than any two-hour movie. But it also presents a tricky challenge. How, with big-budget texture and color, do you bring the splendor and grandiosity of royalty \u2014 in his imagination, the courtesans lived like queens \u2014 to an audience that, at least in his home country of India, will largely be watching on tiny mobile screens?<\/p>\n
One answer is technical: more close-up shots. The other is personal: a vision all his own. With his decades of commercial success, he has the license to hold tight to the kind of cinema \u2014 song-filled nostalgia mixed with obsessive attention to light and detail \u2014 he fell in love with early, and forever.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am still in Alankar Talkies,\u201d he said in an interview last summer, between shoots. \u201cI am seeing it on that big screen over there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Outside, Mumbai was drenched in monsoon rains.<\/p>\n
Inside, under the hangar that covered the three-acre set, Mr. Bhansali was lost in a city born as much of imagination as research.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of workers had toiled for nearly 10 months to create his Lahore of the early 1900s. The furniture was vintage. The curtains and the miniature patterns on the corridor walls were hand-painted, then aged. The slogans on the city walls, the store signs \u2014 all calligraphy, aged and faded.<\/p>\n
When his friend Moin Beg brought him a 14-page concept for the project about 20 years ago, Mr. Bhansali sat on it. There were too many characters, too many things going on, for a feature film.<\/p>\n
In the years that followed, Mr. Bhansali felt as if he was training himself \u201cto handle big scale.\u201d He made successful films \u2014 more recently in a shrinking environment for artistic expression that made him the subject of violent attack<\/a> \u2014 that dealt with dancing girls and royal courts. A consistent theme was complex, powerful, beautiful women.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Another big step: He began creating the music for his own movies.<\/p>\n Some of his deepest artistic questions since childhood were triggered by music. Through music came a belief that any artist is a 200-year-old or 300-year-old soul. The artistic process is a slow discovery of what the soul already knows.<\/p>\n