Just how smug would you be if a movie you spent two decades trying to get made, that required a cast of 400,000 extras (Gandhi’s funeral still holds the record for the largest crowd scene) and that you raised the cash for from scratch and went on to become one of the most critically and commercially successful epics of all time? More smug than Richard Attenborough, probably. “ET was a better piece of cinema,” he shrugs in his best old- man-in-a Werther’s-ad fashion – before going on to describe how Gandhi thrashed Spielberg’s flick at the Oscars. It didn’t deserve to, but its sheer scope and ambition – following the spiritual leader as he liberates India – means it remains a yardstick by which other epics must be measured.
Read the full Gandhi: Special Edition review
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