Jai Sriram! The Lord of Desi Thrillers Is Back With ‘AndhaDhun’

I was adamant about casting Tabu in ‘AndhaDhun’, reveals filmmaker Sriram Raghavan.

“My next is not a ‘where do I hide the dead body?’ kind of film,” I overhear Sriram Raghavan telling someone as I enter his room at the modest Matchbox Pictures office in Andheri, Mumbai. The filmmaker isn’t talking about his latest thriller AndhaDhun, but about his next project - a period film based on the life of India’s youngest soldier to win the Param Vir Chakra after the Indo-Pak war of 1971. But it’s still early days to talk about the war film because we’re all super excited about watching Raghavan’s delicious looking AndhaDhun, featuring Ayushmann Khurrana, Radhika Apte and Tabu first.

Here’s my conversation with Sriram Raghavan about his latest thriller:

The AndhaDhun trailer has got an amazing response, what I and most people loved about it is that it just arouses your interest and teases you with this exciting premise and leaves you guessing. While most trailers now give out the whole beginning, middle and end and leave you with nothing to expect when the film releases. My question is, how involved are you in cutting the trailer of your films, do you give a specific brief or do you just let the marketing team handle it?

Sriram Raghavan: I try my best to avoid being part of the trailer because I feel I will not be objective enough. When the Badlapur trailer was cut, I remember Dinu (Dinesh Vijan) had cut it with Trigger Happy and I was shocked by what I saw, because I felt you have given away this violence and there was this one line in the beginning - “Log kehte hain dushman ko maar dena chahiye, main bhi yeh maanta hoon, lekin tadpaake maarne ke baad”, which Varun does not say in the movie, I didn’t even like the way in which it was framed and all that, so I was very worked up and I remember writing a long email of how the trailer should be. Luckily, they ignored me completely and they went ahead and did the trailer, which apparently worked very well for the movie. So that time I realised its better to stay out.

But in this (AndhaDhun) case, Viacom had done a trailer which I felt was giving away too much, so I tried another version which they felt was too dark, darker than the film was, so we got into this major sort of argument, eventually I said we’ll do a trailer in which nothing is seen, it’s a blind man’s story so you just have audio, if you want to put it out you put it out, they were shocked by the suggestion. 

So it was like two months of crazy fights and eventually at some point the trailer had to go because the release date was coming and we arrived at a compromise. I said remove this, put that shot here and so on. I actually wanted to put out a video saying please don’t watch the trailer, come in cold for the movie, I don’t want views - I had even done a script of that. Anyway, the trailer went out and next morning we were amazed by the response. I read The Quint’s article on the trailer, which was very flattering.

You had mentioned that the script of AndhaDhun was in the works along with Badlapur - it’s inspired by a short film (which I have seen) which you bought the rights to but don’t want to talk about right now. The writing credit mentions you, Arijit Biswas, Pooja Ladha Surti and Yogesh Chandekar. Could you let us in on how the writing process happens when there are four different people involved? Do you all sit together, brainstorm, divide stuff between yourselves, develop the story individually and then return to see which one works best?

Sriram Raghavan: How it began was, I had gone to IIT Chennai for some screenwriting workshop, where I met a lot of chaps, we exchanged email ids. This boy Hemant Rao, he used to send me links to interesting movies and he sent me this short film and I loved it and said - ‘why don’t you expand this’ and we sort of started writing emails to each other, we reached a certain stage, which is what I had when I started talking to Varun. I knew we could crack this story but then Hemant got a chance to make his own film and he opted out of this. I will be giving him a credit too since he introduced me to this, but the writing credits already has 4 names and I was thinking people will think - yeh kya hai, kitne logo ne khichdi pakaya hai. I was very scared, I even thought I will remove my name just to keep the balance right.

The method you are saying is how actually it is. I had written it up to a point and then I said this story can go in 7 or 8 directions from here, so I would tell them you try and write what will happen if it goes in this direction. Eventually, every idea will run out of steam somewhere or we will run out of ideas and we may not be able to take it forward and we get stuck. I can’t tell you in detail right now because it will reveal the story, but eventually we got 2 or 3 tentpole kind of points which could be worked out. We had the first half, and I used to keep writing or I would tell Yogesh to take it forward and flesh out a part or give me just once scene, so we have got many many many versions and drafts and so on.

You had also mentioned that Varun Dhawan was narrated both AndhaDhun and Badlapur, but since Badlapur was a ready script, you went ahead with that. I wanted to know if you change your style of directing a story depending on the actor you are working with. In your mind would AndhaDhun have turned out different if Varun Dhawan had done it instead of Ayushmann?

Sriram Raghavan: I wouldn’t know exactly what the film would be today, since I have done it with Ayushmann, but yeah, it would have changed some where because something would have changed. It’s very difficult to predict what would have changed. But initially I had narrated this to Varun and he had enjoyed it but of course we didn’t have the second half. The Badlapur story was complete - the beginning, middle and end everything was there, but I felt no one would go for that kind of story, however, fortunately Dinu loved it and Varun loved it even more and it just happened, so we kind of kept this (AndhaDhun) aside.

After Badlapur got over I thought let me get back to this and make it, I spoke to Varun but he was interested in some different and bigger kind of film, so I thought, we’ve worked and got a fab film together, there is no hurry to do it the next time with the same actor, whenever we do another one we’ll do it.

Ayushmann coming in was great because Ayushmann being a musician it was easier for him to learn the piano, I didn’t want hand doubles and that kind of cutting. So Ayushmann was actually the perfect choice, but he was the only person I didn’t approach, I had never thought of him but somehow he texted me and said I heard about this script and would like to  audition for it. 

Then we just got along, he loved the story, I remember one line he said - ‘this story is star proof it’s not actor proof’.

How involved were you with Ayushmann’s prepping for the role to play a blind man?

Sriram Raghavan: We went the National Association for the Blind and spent time there, watching people and there was one boy there who got blind, like Ayushmann in the story at a certain age. Through him I met another guy who was born blind, that guy is a musician and he’s a very happy guy - he’s got a girlfriend, he’s got a band and he plays the piano of all things. I even narrated the story to them just to see how they would react to the story and it was a great experience actually. I have even recorded it.

How did the rest of the cast fall in place, Radhika and Tabu?

Sriram Raghavan: Radhika was there listening to the story just as a friend for feedback, and she asked who is playing the role of Simi, there is a character called Simi, who is played by Tabu. I said, Tabu is already doing it, so she was like ‘Ohhhh!’ but I said the other role is there and she said, yes I will do that one. So I didn’t pitch it to her. I actually read it to all my Badlapur actors, I had narrated it to Huma also, she also wanted to play Tabu’s character, she said, ‘if Tabu gives you any trouble then you tell me’. Tabu was broadly on my mind while I was writing the script and Simi’s character, for me there was no doubt... I mean there were other pressures from different people like “think about it” and this and that...

Saleability, that sort of thing?

All the usual kind of things, but I was quite adamant about casting Tabu.

The biggest surprise in the cast is of course Anil Dhawan. My memory of Anil Dhawan is that beautiful Kishore Kumar song ‘Yeh jeevan hai, iss jeevan ka...’ from Piya ka Ghar, in which he is seen with Jaya Bachchan. How did the quirky idea of casting Anil Dhawan come about?

Sriram Raghavan: We had this character of an older man who is playing Tabu’s husband, so it could have been a business magnate or a factory owner or something but somehow I felt it would be nice if he were a retired actor, someone like Amol Palekar, not that he is retired but he’s living in some other city and is out of the regular industry.

So initially we thought we will take some character actor of now and make him into a fictitious actor of the 70s and I thought it would be fun, making a list of movies and creating fake movie clips, then this thought came about - what if I find somebody who was actually an actor in the 70s so that we get visuals of his younger days, his songs and so on? The first person I thought of was Anil Dhawan for some reason and he’s got some terrific songs, he’s had some iconic films. In AndhaDhun he plays an actor called Pramod Sinha.

Pooja Ladha Surti has been a constant collaborator since Ek Hasina Thi, she has edited all your films or co-written your scripts, which shows that you do like a certain amount of familiarity when it comes to your team, your writers and editor particularly. But at that same time, you have different cinematographers shooting your last 3 films - is that like a conscious thing to work with different talents in a certain department while relying on the same talent in others?

Sriram Raghavan: With cinematographers what happened is that I did 3 films with Murali and then when we were doing Badlapur he was busy with PK. Then Anil Mehta is my senior from FTII by a few years, and I think he is a very edgy person though he does  a lot of mass, mainstream kind of films. Badlapur was a very small film, it was shot in just 40 days. So the first 10 days was like, even my assistant used to come and tell me ‘arre you have written it like this, see how he is shooting it’ and I used to ask them, do you have any fundamental problem with the shot? I realised by and by that it really helps me to have a DOP with the right sensibility even if it is a different guy, the texture of the film changes subtly. Mohanan has shot AndhaDhun but I am happy that he has shot it because now I don’t know what somebody else would have done with it.

You are pretty old school with your references to films and novels - from Vijay Anand to James Hadley Chase, how are you taking to the new explosion of web shows on Netflix and Amazon?

Sriram Raghavan: I don’t binge watch at all. I have seen only 3 episodes of Sacred Games. I’ve watched Breaking Bad, I’ve watched Fargo, Westworld... Narcos I’ve seen.

Unlike say the Mission Impossible series, your thrillers are slow-burning type, do you get concerned about the attention span problem which the current audience has? I go to watch a film in a theatre and there are people checking their WhatsApp messages or Instagram right in the middle of it.

Sriram Raghavan: I try to watch films in the morning when there are less people. I actually get very disturbed when the person in the seat in front has their phone on because the light hits the eye. So, I try to watch films when the hall is least crowded. Though, I want my movies to be packed, even if people are checking their phones I don’t mind. But the thing is little dicey for my kind of movies, because if you don’t really pay attention, you’re going to lose a lot of things, and if you lose those one or two things, you are going to get quite rattled. I have to just hope that what’s going on on screen is compelling enough.

Your next film is on Arun Khetarpal, the youngest soldier to win the Param Vir Chakra at the age of 21 for his service during the 1971 Indo-Pak war. That’s a completely new zone for you - how are you preparing for it.

Sriram Raghavan: My actual prep has not begun till I get finished with this one (AndhaDhun), Ritesh is writing it. Right now I can’t tell too much about it, but that’s a film when I heard the basic idea, it was not just another biopic. There was something about that story, when Dinu told me that story I was coming back and telling Pooja and a couple of people and as I was narrating it I was getting a little choked up and I felt there was something interesting for me to tell there. I like war films and this had a very Clint Eastwood kind of feel to it. How would Clint Eastwood have done this - sort of became my driving thought.