Interview: Charudutt Acharya – We don’t take pride in our reality. That’s why Indian OTT shows are not widely watched

How did writing begin for you?

I never thought I was a writer-writer. I was more interested in directing. But even that started later. As a child, I hardly read any books – some James Hadley Chase and stuff like that. I grew up in Juhu Gaothan, which was two minutes away from the beach. I remember, my school teacher gave me a book by Tagore and told me I should be a writer. I took a fancy to the idea and carried a notebook to the beach and started scribbling something. Instead of playing football on the beach, I spent a few evenings writing. I only remember the title of the first poem I wrote: I love it when it rains. Then I remember writing an article for the school magazine which got rejected because I wrote about school kids bunking and going to the bakery! After that, for a long while I never wrote anything. I was an avid movie-watcher though. I watched whatever films I could. Then, when I joined FTII – I joined the direction course – I used to help others with writing. I had a knack for dialogue. I could write in Hindi and wrote dialogues for some student films and worked on some story ideas as well. I always had this ability to narrate stories. Even at school, I was known as a storyteller. But I never wrote the stories down. At FTII, many would wonder how I always had so many stories to tell. I think, although I was never an avid reader, I had a lot of life experience from an early age. My dad was a very interesting person. He once told me that I should go and see all the railway stations of Bombay! He’d give me some money and I’d go to a railway station alone, eat at a restaurant nearby, sometimes watch a film. One day, I’d go to Navy Nagar, another day to Bhaucha Dhakka, yet another day, I’d go watch flamingos. He wanted me to find out what different areas in the city are like. I think that contributed a lot to my liking for people and places. I was deeply interested in finding out how real people speak and the many different dialects that exist in this city. I find that Apun-tupun speech which most films used as Bombay dialect quite stupid. I used to think that they could do better because the real speech is nothing like that.

What was it like to enter the film industry after FTII?

That’s quite a story. In 1995, I graduated from FTII. In 1996, I got married. And in 1997, I met with an accident. By that time, I had finished assisting on two films – Albela and Jab Pyaar Kisi Se Hota Hai. Their schedules were in Europe so it was a lot of fun. I also did a lot of work for Plus Channel, which was quite a big production house back in the 1990s. After that, my friend Onir asked me if I could write something for Kalpana Lajmi. The project did not go on the floors but I got paid for it. And I realised that for writing one episode, I had been paid as much as my whole month’s salary at Plus Channel. I also did some work on commercials. There was something called Asian Sky Shop that used to be aired on cable TV in the 1990s. I did some work on that as well. While I was doing that, in 1997, an accident squashed one of my legs. I was going for an edit in a rickshaw and some vehicle crashed it. It was quite a dramatic time because I was newly married, my wife was pregnant and I thought now with this accident, I won’t be able to work. I had no money, no insurance. It was a messy situation. I had huge medical bills. And directing and being on set was not going to be possible any longer. The only thing I could do sitting at home was writing. And I turned that into my full time profession. Quite literally, I became a writer by accident! I used to write, save money, get operated and spend money on raising my children. I spent a lot of my time writing television. D Line was one of the first shows I wrote regularly. I had studied cinema in FTII and initially it was not easy to write for television. TV writing has its own rules. I learnt on the job that you can’t have, say, one scene at Starbucks and then not have three more that have Starbucks in it. Also, you can’t suddenly have a scene on TV where two people are conversing and behind them four clowns pass by. TV writing is a very specific skill and eventually I got the hang of it. Cinema is “Show, don’t tell”. In TV it is “Tell and only when it is necessary, show.” Then I got to write shows that got famous like Haqeeqat and much later, Crime Patrol.

What was it like writing your first film, Vastushastra?

Saurabh Narang, who unfortunately is no more, was the director of the film. This was back in 2002. Ram Gopal Varma had told him that he wanted to do something on the lines of Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery. So Saurabh told me a one-line idea. I was a co-writer on the film. Ramu was a very bright mind. I had great respect for him because I had seen Satya and everything else. At that point, he was a hero to me. So I obviously wanted to work with him. There were lots of things in the film that even we weren’t sure of but we just went ahead and did it. Also, the film did not pay me much so I had to continue writing TV. It did not take me onto the next level of film writing. I stuck to TV.

Walk me through the journey of writing Dum Maro Dum.

Shridhar Raghavan had written the script. I used to sometimes go for addabazi to his house so Shridhar and Shriram knew me. I had also worked on a TV pilot with Sriram long ago. One day, Shridhar asked me to write dialogues for the film. I was on set most of the time and it was fun. I had a great time with Rohan Sippy, who produced it. Also, the film had stars. It was almost after 10 years that I was working with stars. The last time I did it was on Vastushastra, which had Sushmita Sen. After that, I wrote a film which got selected at the Mahindra Sundance Script Lab. Rohan produced it. It was called Sonali Cable. I made the film but it bombed so I was back to writing TV.

What did Crime Patrol do for your career?

I wrote Crime Patrol for many years – from 2009 to 2019. The show was a huge success. It became part of my routine. I wrote dialogue for it. Every day, I’d wake up at 4 O’clock in the morning and by 10AM, I’d be done with one episode. Writing it became like muscle memory. It was a regular and fixed income. Even if films or nothing else worked, I knew I had Crime Patrol to bank on. I was known as the Crime Patrol writer and it helped me immensely to survive.

What do you enjoy writing the most?

I have written for several shows and TV and some films but what I enjoy writing the most is Facebook posts. In fact, someone offered to publish a book of my posts. Now, I am also working on a novel. TV writers are not very valued and films never really took off for me. I was in a bit of a shock when Sonali Cable bombed.

Aranyak was a big hit. Did that change a lot for you?

The two most defining projects in my life are Crime Patrol and then after OTT happened, Aranyak. The idea for Aranyak came to me in 2013, when I took a vacation to Manali with my family. Near Shimla, there was a pass – I forget its name. You could ride horses there. My wife’s saddle was a little weak and we had told the guys who organised the ride that we needed it replaced. They assured us that nothing would happen. 10 steps later, my wife fell off the horse. I was scared and I told them that we wouldn’t ride. They refused to return our money. At that time, it was not a small amount for me, so we argued. They didn’t budge. I decided to file a police complaint. In a while, we found a quaint police station at a nondescript place. I went inside with my wife and kids. In the police station, there was a woman who was teaching math to her children while cutting some vegetables. She asked us, “Kya hua, ji? Kya hua?” I explained the situation to her. She seemed very kind. She took my wife inside and gave her some clothes, had someone wash her clothes. She ordered tea and pakodas for us. It was good but I said, I am here to make a complaint. She kept saying, “Ho jayega, ho jayega.” Then she settled my kids down and switched on the TV for them. Then after a while, she got to a room and sat across the table to write the complaint down. I asked her, “Accha, aap SHO hai?” She looked at me and said, “Kyun? Dikkat hai koi?” Suddenly, there was a switch in her character. She started acting very professionally and then got one of her constables to get those guys. The guys were brought in and were shivering to see her and she slammed each one of them with a rod and asked them to return our money. They did. She kept their licenses with her for a day. The guys went. I thought now she would ask for a bribe for helping us out. But she didn’t do any of that. She told me, “Yeh hamara kartavya hai.” She also said that if you took tourism out of Himachal, only drugs would remain. She wanted family tourist like us to keep visiting the place. This incident stunned me. The character fascinated me. Her name was Kasturi Dogra, which I gave the protagonist of Aranyak, played by Raveena Tandon. That night, in the hotel room, I started writing about this character. At that time, I had no idea for what I would use her. But my wife told me, you could make a film about it someday. During the same trip, we went to the Hidimba temple. The place is surrounded by charas and everybody there was smoking up. It was an epiphanic moment. We also met a guy who was telling children stories about a character in the forest who’s half man and half leopard. My children were freaking out but I was fascinated. One night, at the hotel, I was drinking my rum and I thought what if I fuse these stories together and cross-genre them? Then I read about an unfortunate incident in Goa where a British teenage girl was raped and murdered. Her mother was being judged because she was into drugs with her boyfriend. The mother said something like “Just because I do drugs, it doesn’t mean my daughter doesn’t deserve justice.” I remember feeling bad for her. Many years later, all this came together as Aranyak. Initially, I thought of doing it as a film. Rohan Sippy was interested in producing it. Then, as a mini-series. We went to various production houses. In fact, Jio signed us on and everything was falling in place. It was a different cast at that time. Three weeks before shooting started, Jio pulled the plug on all their shows. It was huge shock. But in a few months, Siddharth Roy Kapur showed interest. After that Raveena Tandon came on board. And then, Netflix bought the rights from Jio and Aranyak became what it is today. Aranyak is my original idea and I have written the whole show: every episode, all screenplay and all dialogue. Rohan was my producer all through on this. So he became the showrunner.

How different is it to write for TV, film and OTT?

Look, in TV, there are two distinct kinds of writing. One is the soap opera, which is like the BJP of TV because it is in the majority. About 80% of the work that happens on TV is soap opera. The rest of the 20% where people do crime shows and other stuff is something that I have been involved with. I could never do the soap operas because I don’t think I know how to write them well and I wasn’t very interested in them either. Even Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahi, on which I was one of the writers, is not really a kitchen-based soap opera. Soap opera is a different grammar. Also, you get paid more on soap operas than on the other 20% of the work. But I never did a soap opera. I did more of episodic TV and mini-series. That, now in the time of OTT, works in my favour. Many film writers find it difficult to crack OTT. Episodic TV is somewhere between a film and OTT so I found it relatively easy. OTT writing has its own challenges. Nowadays, you have Korean and British and so many other shows to watch. So as Indian OTT writers, you really have to, as Billy Wilder once said, “Grab them by the neck and hold them tight.” I also think we are missing a trick or two in OTT writing. In trying to shock the audience, we are losing out on authenticity in our stories. Most of the best international shows are rooted in their country and culture. We are still trying to copy the west. We are using sex and abuse for the sake of it. I mean, of course, if the story requires it, it’s fine. But sometimes, we just try to do just that. For instance, the idea of a liberated woman on Indian OTT is one who goes out and has four shots of vodka or has sex in the car. These are things that have come to us from shows from the west. It is aspirational but not real. Middle-India cannot relate to this. We don’t take pride in our culture or in our reality. That’s one of the reasons why Indian OTT shows are not watched widely in India let alone outside the country. You are living off Korean and Latin American films, you are working in advertising or something like that and living somewhere between Lokhandwala and South Bombay; how will you cater to a larger audience? I think we lack talent in writing. I have seen a lot of half-baked stories getting into production. We usually don’t think beyond templates; we think formulaic stories. Panchayat is a show that is rooted in the country, even Patal Lok. To an extent, although, it is fiction, Aranyak is rooted in India as well. There’s a certain Indianness to it. We had taken the call not to use sex and abuse at all in Aranyak. I guess, it worked.

How much of a role has FTII played in your journey?

FTII has definitely played a role. It’s a place that exposes you to a lot of cinema and also teaches you a lot about the craft for filmmaking. In that respect, it has been beneficial for sure. In terms of writing, however, I am not too sure. At least when I was there, back in the 1990’s, it did not have a great writing department at all. I think we didn’t have a course in writing. We just had a professor who had his own ideas about what a script should be and stuff like that. Also, there was a huge disconnect with the industry. FTII was very unapologetic about wanting to cater to arthouse cinema. The Mumbai industry did not need an FTII. It has always produced its own writers and directors and cameramen who are equally competent. FTII always focussed on creating independent cinema. Of course, there are some FTII directors who have done well in the commercial space like Raju Hirani and Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Personally, I think it definitely helped me. I feel privileged I was there. But I feel that I was exposed to so much there that I couldn’t absorb at the time. It’s like you are grappling with grammar and someone exposes you to poetry. You watch a lot, your expectations from yourself are high but your ability to reach there is not enough. So at FTII, you struggle.

What are your favourite films, filmmakers and shows?

In Hindi cinema, which I grew up watching, my favourites are Vijay Anand – Guide, Johnny Mera Naam, Jewel Thief. I definitely like the work of Sai Paranjape. I like the work of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee. I like some early films of Shyam Benegal. Also some films by Govind Nihlani. As a child, I also like films of Manmohan Desai but I can’t relate to them anymore. I was, in fact, very influenced by the TV of the 1980’s. I quite like Malgudi Days, I love Tamas.

In terms of international filmmakers, I love the Japanese filmmakers Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. I love the work of Satyajit Ray. I love the work of the Latin American filmmaker Alejandro Inarritu. I also like the American directors like the Coen brothers a lot. And the work of Alexander Payne who made films like Sideways, Election, About Schmidt. I also like the early films of Ridley Scott. I love Alan Parker, of course Hitchcock. I like a Chinese director called Zhang Yimou. I like the Iranian Majid Majidi a lot.

Among OTT shows, I like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul. The British show Broadchurch is a huge favourite of mine.

Name a film and a show that you would like to have written.

Amongst shows, I think that would be Broadchurch. Then there was one episode of Better Call Saul, I think the third, which I saw and I thought if I manage to write and direct one piece like that, I’d have done something worthwhile in life. I get this kind of a feeling on some films like As Good As It Gets as well. And The Shawshank Redemption. I think The Shawshank Redemption is my favourite film in the world.

Given a chance, which director in the world would you like to write for?

The Coen brothers. They are brilliant directors. And Walter Salles, the guy who made The Motorcycle Diaries. In India, the guy whose work I really, really like a lot is Shimit Amin. I’d love to write for him.

Mihir Chitre is the author of two books of poetry, ‘School of Age’ and ‘Hyphenated’. He is the brain behind the advertising campaigns ‘#LaughAtDeath’ and ‘#HarBhashaEqual’ and has made the short film ‘Hello Brick Road’.

How did writing begin for you?

I never thought I was a writer-writer. I was more interested in directing. But even that started later. As a child, I hardly read any books – some James Hadley Chase and stuff like that. I grew up in Juhu Gaothan, which was two minutes away from the beach. I remember, my school teacher gave me a book by Tagore and told me I should be a writer. I took a fancy to the idea and carried a notebook to the beach and started scribbling something. Instead of playing football on the beach, I spent a few evenings writing. I only remember the title of the first poem I wrote: I love it when it rains. Then I remember writing an article for the school magazine which got rejected because I wrote about school kids bunking and going to the bakery! After that, for a long while I never wrote anything. I was an avid movie-watcher though. I watched whatever films I could. Then, when I joined FTII – I joined the direction course – I used to help others with writing. I had a knack for dialogue. I could write in Hindi and wrote dialogues for some student films and worked on some story ideas as well. I always had this ability to narrate stories. Even at school, I was known as a storyteller. But I never wrote the stories down. At FTII, many would wonder how I always had so many stories to tell. I think, although I was never an avid reader, I had a lot of life experience from an early age. My dad was a very interesting person. He once told me that I should go and see all the railway stations of Bombay! He’d give me some money and I’d go to a railway station alone, eat at a restaurant nearby, sometimes watch a film. One day, I’d go to Navy Nagar, another day to Bhaucha Dhakka, yet another day, I’d go watch flamingos. He wanted me to find out what different areas in the city are like. I think that contributed a lot to my liking for people and places. I was deeply interested in finding out how real people speak and the many different dialects that exist in this city. I find that Apun-tupun speech which most films used as Bombay dialect quite stupid. I used to think that they could do better because the real speech is nothing like that.

What was it like to enter the film industry after FTII?

That’s quite a story. In 1995, I graduated from FTII. In 1996, I got married. And in 1997, I met with an accident. By that time, I had finished assisting on two films – Albela and Jab Pyaar Kisi Se Hota Hai. Their schedules were in Europe so it was a lot of fun. I also did a lot of work for Plus Channel, which was quite a big production house back in the 1990s. After that, my friend Onir asked me if I could write something for Kalpana Lajmi. The project did not go on the floors but I got paid for it. And I realised that for writing one episode, I had been paid as much as my whole month’s salary at Plus Channel. I also did some work on commercials. There was something called Asian Sky Shop that used to be aired on cable TV in the 1990s. I did some work on that as well. While I was doing that, in 1997, an accident squashed one of my legs. I was going for an edit in a rickshaw and some vehicle crashed it. It was quite a dramatic time because I was newly married, my wife was pregnant and I thought now with this accident, I won’t be able to work. I had no money, no insurance. It was a messy situation. I had huge medical bills. And directing and being on set was not going to be possible any longer. The only thing I could do sitting at home was writing. And I turned that into my full time profession. Quite literally, I became a writer by accident! I used to write, save money, get operated and spend money on raising my children. I spent a lot of my time writing television. D Line was one of the first shows I wrote regularly. I had studied cinema in FTII and initially it was not easy to write for television. TV writing has its own rules. I learnt on the job that you can’t have, say, one scene at Starbucks and then not have three more that have Starbucks in it. Also, you can’t suddenly have a scene on TV where two people are conversing and behind them four clowns pass by. TV writing is a very specific skill and eventually I got the hang of it. Cinema is “Show, don’t tell”. In TV it is “Tell and only when it is necessary, show.” Then I got to write shows that got famous like Haqeeqat and much later, Crime Patrol.

What was it like writing your first film, Vastushastra?

Saurabh Narang, who unfortunately is no more, was the director of the film. This was back in 2002. Ram Gopal Varma had told him that he wanted to do something on the lines of Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery. So Saurabh told me a one-line idea. I was a co-writer on the film. Ramu was a very bright mind. I had great respect for him because I had seen Satya and everything else. At that point, he was a hero to me. So I obviously wanted to work with him. There were lots of things in the film that even we weren’t sure of but we just went ahead and did it. Also, the film did not pay me much so I had to continue writing TV. It did not take me onto the next level of film writing. I stuck to TV.

Walk me through the journey of writing Dum Maro Dum.

Shridhar Raghavan had written the script. I used to sometimes go for addabazi to his house so Shridhar and Shriram knew me. I had also worked on a TV pilot with Sriram long ago. One day, Shridhar asked me to write dialogues for the film. I was on set most of the time and it was fun. I had a great time with Rohan Sippy, who produced it. Also, the film had stars. It was almost after 10 years that I was working with stars. The last time I did it was on Vastushastra, which had Sushmita Sen. After that, I wrote a film which got selected at the Mahindra Sundance Script Lab. Rohan produced it. It was called Sonali Cable. I made the film but it bombed so I was back to writing TV.

What did Crime Patrol do for your career?

I wrote Crime Patrol for many years – from 2009 to 2019. The show was a huge success. It became part of my routine. I wrote dialogue for it. Every day, I’d wake up at 4 O’clock in the morning and by 10AM, I’d be done with one episode. Writing it became like muscle memory. It was a regular and fixed income. Even if films or nothing else worked, I knew I had Crime Patrol to bank on. I was known as the Crime Patrol writer and it helped me immensely to survive.

What do you enjoy writing the most?

I have written for several shows and TV and some films but what I enjoy writing the most is Facebook posts. In fact, someone offered to publish a book of my posts. Now, I am also working on a novel. TV writers are not very valued and films never really took off for me. I was in a bit of a shock when Sonali Cable bombed.

Aranyak was a big hit. Did that change a lot for you?

The two most defining projects in my life are Crime Patrol and then after OTT happened, Aranyak. The idea for Aranyak came to me in 2013, when I took a vacation to Manali with my family. Near Shimla, there was a pass – I forget its name. You could ride horses there. My wife’s saddle was a little weak and we had told the guys who organised the ride that we needed it replaced. They assured us that nothing would happen. 10 steps later, my wife fell off the horse. I was scared and I told them that we wouldn’t ride. They refused to return our money. At that time, it was not a small amount for me, so we argued. They didn’t budge. I decided to file a police complaint. In a while, we found a quaint police station at a nondescript place. I went inside with my wife and kids. In the police station, there was a woman who was teaching math to her children while cutting some vegetables. She asked us, “Kya hua, ji? Kya hua?” I explained the situation to her. She seemed very kind. She took my wife inside and gave her some clothes, had someone wash her clothes. She ordered tea and pakodas for us. It was good but I said, I am here to make a complaint. She kept saying, “Ho jayega, ho jayega.” Then she settled my kids down and switched on the TV for them. Then after a while, she got to a room and sat across the table to write the complaint down. I asked her, “Accha, aap SHO hai?” She looked at me and said, “Kyun? Dikkat hai koi?” Suddenly, there was a switch in her character. She started acting very professionally and then got one of her constables to get those guys. The guys were brought in and were shivering to see her and she slammed each one of them with a rod and asked them to return our money. They did. She kept their licenses with her for a day. The guys went. I thought now she would ask for a bribe for helping us out. But she didn’t do any of that. She told me, “Yeh hamara kartavya hai.” She also said that if you took tourism out of Himachal, only drugs would remain. She wanted family tourist like us to keep visiting the place. This incident stunned me. The character fascinated me. Her name was Kasturi Dogra, which I gave the protagonist of Aranyak, played by Raveena Tandon. That night, in the hotel room, I started writing about this character. At that time, I had no idea for what I would use her. But my wife told me, you could make a film about it someday. During the same trip, we went to the Hidimba temple. The place is surrounded by charas and everybody there was smoking up. It was an epiphanic moment. We also met a guy who was telling children stories about a character in the forest who’s half man and half leopard. My children were freaking out but I was fascinated. One night, at the hotel, I was drinking my rum and I thought what if I fuse these stories together and cross-genre them? Then I read about an unfortunate incident in Goa where a British teenage girl was raped and murdered. Her mother was being judged because she was into drugs with her boyfriend. The mother said something like “Just because I do drugs, it doesn’t mean my daughter doesn’t deserve justice.” I remember feeling bad for her. Many years later, all this came together as Aranyak. Initially, I thought of doing it as a film. Rohan Sippy was interested in producing it. Then, as a mini-series. We went to various production houses. In fact, Jio signed us on and everything was falling in place. It was a different cast at that time. Three weeks before shooting started, Jio pulled the plug on all their shows. It was huge shock. But in a few months, Siddharth Roy Kapur showed interest. After that Raveena Tandon came on board. And then, Netflix bought the rights from Jio and Aranyak became what it is today. Aranyak is my original idea and I have written the whole show: every episode, all screenplay and all dialogue. Rohan was my producer all through on this. So he became the showrunner.

How different is it to write for TV, film and OTT?

Look, in TV, there are two distinct kinds of writing. One is the soap opera, which is like the BJP of TV because it is in the majority. About 80% of the work that happens on TV is soap opera. The rest of the 20% where people do crime shows and other stuff is something that I have been involved with. I could never do the soap operas because I don’t think I know how to write them well and I wasn’t very interested in them either. Even Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahi, on which I was one of the writers, is not really a kitchen-based soap opera. Soap opera is a different grammar. Also, you get paid more on soap operas than on the other 20% of the work. But I never did a soap opera. I did more of episodic TV and mini-series. That, now in the time of OTT, works in my favour. Many film writers find it difficult to crack OTT. Episodic TV is somewhere between a film and OTT so I found it relatively easy. OTT writing has its own challenges. Nowadays, you have Korean and British and so many other shows to watch. So as Indian OTT writers, you really have to, as Billy Wilder once said, “Grab them by the neck and hold them tight.” I also think we are missing a trick or two in OTT writing. In trying to shock the audience, we are losing out on authenticity in our stories. Most of the best international shows are rooted in their country and culture. We are still trying to copy the west. We are using sex and abuse for the sake of it. I mean, of course, if the story requires it, it’s fine. But sometimes, we just try to do just that. For instance, the idea of a liberated woman on Indian OTT is one who goes out and has four shots of vodka or has sex in the car. These are things that have come to us from shows from the west. It is aspirational but not real. Middle-India cannot relate to this. We don’t take pride in our culture or in our reality. That’s one of the reasons why Indian OTT shows are not watched widely in India let alone outside the country. You are living off Korean and Latin American films, you are working in advertising or something like that and living somewhere between Lokhandwala and South Bombay; how will you cater to a larger audience? I think we lack talent in writing. I have seen a lot of half-baked stories getting into production. We usually don’t think beyond templates; we think formulaic stories. Panchayat is a show that is rooted in the country, even Patal Lok. To an extent, although, it is fiction, Aranyak is rooted in India as well. There’s a certain Indianness to it. We had taken the call not to use sex and abuse at all in Aranyak. I guess, it worked.

How much of a role has FTII played in your journey?

FTII has definitely played a role. It’s a place that exposes you to a lot of cinema and also teaches you a lot about the craft for filmmaking. In that respect, it has been beneficial for sure. In terms of writing, however, I am not too sure. At least when I was there, back in the 1990’s, it did not have a great writing department at all. I think we didn’t have a course in writing. We just had a professor who had his own ideas about what a script should be and stuff like that. Also, there was a huge disconnect with the industry. FTII was very unapologetic about wanting to cater to arthouse cinema. The Mumbai industry did not need an FTII. It has always produced its own writers and directors and cameramen who are equally competent. FTII always focussed on creating independent cinema. Of course, there are some FTII directors who have done well in the commercial space like Raju Hirani and Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Personally, I think it definitely helped me. I feel privileged I was there. But I feel that I was exposed to so much there that I couldn’t absorb at the time. It’s like you are grappling with grammar and someone exposes you to poetry. You watch a lot, your expectations from yourself are high but your ability to reach there is not enough. So at FTII, you struggle.

What are your favourite films, filmmakers and shows?

In Hindi cinema, which I grew up watching, my favourites are Vijay Anand – Guide, Johnny Mera Naam, Jewel Thief. I definitely like the work of Sai Paranjape. I like the work of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee. I like some early films of Shyam Benegal. Also some films by Govind Nihlani. As a child, I also like films of Manmohan Desai but I can’t relate to them anymore. I was, in fact, very influenced by the TV of the 1980’s. I quite like Malgudi Days, I love Tamas.

In terms of international filmmakers, I love the Japanese filmmakers Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. I love the work of Satyajit Ray. I love the work of the Latin American filmmaker Alejandro Inarritu. I also like the American directors like the Coen brothers a lot. And the work of Alexander Payne who made films like Sideways, Election, About Schmidt. I also like the early films of Ridley Scott. I love Alan Parker, of course Hitchcock. I like a Chinese director called Zhang Yimou. I like the Iranian Majid Majidi a lot.

Among OTT shows, I like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul. The British show Broadchurch is a huge favourite of mine.

Name a film and a show that you would like to have written.

Amongst shows, I think that would be Broadchurch. Then there was one episode of Better Call Saul, I think the third, which I saw and I thought if I manage to write and direct one piece like that, I’d have done something worthwhile in life. I get this kind of a feeling on some films like As Good As It Gets as well. And The Shawshank Redemption. I think The Shawshank Redemption is my favourite film in the world.

Given a chance, which director in the world would you like to write for?

The Coen brothers. They are brilliant directors. And Walter Salles, the guy who made The Motorcycle Diaries. In India, the guy whose work I really, really like a lot is Shimit Amin. I’d love to write for him.

Mihir Chitre is the author of two books of poetry, ‘School of Age’ and ‘Hyphenated’. He is the brain behind the advertising campaigns ‘#LaughAtDeath’ and ‘#HarBhashaEqual’ and has made the short film ‘Hello Brick Road’.