Ram Gopal Varma about Bollywood: ‘Directors don’t get as much freedom’

4 min readHyderabadUpdated: Jul 31, 2026 03:47 PM IST Ram Gopal Varma commented that the Bollywood started taking accountability post COVIDDirector Ram Gopal Varma believes that Bollywood began taking accountability and discipline seriously only after the COVID-19 pandemic, when years of consecutive flops opened the door for South Indian cinema to take over the national market. Speaking on Great Andhra, Ram Gopal Varma said the Hindi film industry now operates on a corporate model where budgets are fixed, directors bear personal financial responsibility for overruns, and nobody is allowed to simply sit on dates and spend hundreds of crores without delivering a product on time.Ram Gopal Varma drew a line between how the two industries function. “The only thing about Bombay is there’s a bit