Namit Malhotra

The Founder, Executive Chairman and Global CEO of Prime Focus is arguably India’s biggest success story in Hollywood. Two decades and several challenges later, he’s bullish about what lies ahead.

- Shweta Mehta Sen

 Growing up, Namit Malhotra was quite disinterested in the work he does today. “A bunch of what we do is all about CGI and creative, artistic work. I didn’t care much for either. But since my grandfather and father were both in the film business – as a cinematographer and producer respectively – I was interested in making films,” he recalls.

Malhotra wanted to be “different”, though, and in the midst of his teenaged struggle with picking a career, his father offered him a valuable bit of advice. “He told me that the movie business is evergreen, and that I could enter it whenever I wanted. He gave me some perspective of how long it took him to reach a point where he could fund a film. He didn’t want me to face so many challenges.”

Since everything was about computers in those days, Malhotra finally signed up for a quick computer graphics course and realised it wasn’t as complicated as he had made it out to be. “Down the road, I realized there was an opportunity there, with everything getting digitized. There was a major transformation happening. I had three guys teaching me, and I figured that they obviously knew better than me, so I hired all of them and we set up Prime Focus in a garage in 1995,” he says.