Interview: Sumit Saxena – “With the advent of AI, every artist will have to lear
Did you always want to be a writer?
I was born and raised in Lucknow. My family wasn’t into literature as such except that my grandfather was interested in Urdu poetry. My school group was interested in fiction. We would read books and discuss them at length. I did start writing pretty early. I wrote my first play in the sixth standard. There was a story called Waseehat; one day, my friend and I sat on the last bench and wrote an English adaptation of it. I kept writing in school, but it was only when I went to college, which was IIT Varanasi, that I started writing regularly. I went to IIT not because I wanted to get into a fancy institute or a fancy job at the end of it but because I was interested in physics and mathematics. It was genuine curiosity that led me to IIT. I had some unanswered questions while I was growing up and thought the answers to them lay in science. It was only after going to IIT that I realized that those answers may lie in art. If science could not answer a few of my questions, maybe fiction could.
Vijay Verma has articulated some of those questions very well in a series called Cheers. It’s probably one of his finest performances ever and both of us are very passionate about the series. One of the questions that was on my mind was “How to live in a fashion where internal turbulence is minimized?” I still haven’t found the exact answers to these questions. But there is a longer philosophical quest that I am on to find them. I have a theory of my own about this which I call The HMS Beagle Theory. Let me tell you a story: In the 19th century, a guy got onto a ship called the HMS Beagle and with a small crew, he went from one island to another, sailing in difficult waters. He picked up animals, dissected them and made drawings of their anatomy. About 10 to 15 years later, he came up with the theory of evolution. That guy was Charles Darwin. My theory is that by taking a dangerous journey, he added an inch to human consciousness and awareness. Without his theory, we would be a dumber race. I believe it would be good for every person to have their own HMS Beagle and have their own sea. If you have your own ship and your own sea, it’s easier to go through life, and you might even end up discovering something that adds something to our knowledge as a race. I think the quest of life, at least of my life, is to find truth. And the more truth you know, the less turbulent your life will be.
Being a writer with a keen interest in science, what’s your take on the advent of AI in the field of creativity?
You know, I have never given up on my scientific pursuit. I still code and I am still trying to learn to code. I am trying to learn Python currently. I think with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), every artist who wants to stay relevant will have to learn how to code. I am predicting this and hopefully it will be true and in the next three to five years, we will be watching a film in a cinema hall that is written and made entirely by AI. Very soon, Netflix will have a separate section for films that are entirely generated by AI. That is inevitable.
Do you think AI taking over creativity is progress or regression for society?
I think it is progress. For you to be relevant as an artist in the world of AI, whether your art is text-based, visual-based or music-based, you will have to be ferociously original. If you are truly original, you will be relevant. Because currently, what AI does is use precedence and adapt it in its own ways. It is not creating something ferociously original. But in a world like that, if you are mediocre, you will die. AI will eat you up with the sheer speed at which it functions. It’s going to push the limits of all those people who intend to be original. And all this will happen in the rather near future. Then, as it is predicted when AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) comes in by 2029, it will be able to think on its own and start creating original ideas and films. One big fear I have with this is that whatever you can do, AGI will do it faster and better. At this point, you would have no reward for creation. And once there is no reward to be had, human intelligence might stop being curious and original. That would lead to a kind of intellectual laziness.
If you allow me, let me float a radical idea. Look, DNA is 4.5 billion years old. We physically evolved into what we are today over the course of this time. Simultaneously our frontal lobe was being developed, the language circuit in our brain got developed. We first mechanized physical labour. Then we mechanized the intellect using computers. Now, when AGI is up and running, we might need to change our own biology. We might need to change our own neurology. Imagine a person with four hands, for example. Would they not play the guitar better than someone with just two? I think this is the kind of stuff we will getting into in the next 200 years or so. If you have heard of CRIPSR – the DNA-altering technology – we are already moving in that direction.
Your most critically acclaimed film so far is Doctor G. Could you run me through the journey of writing and conceptualizing it?
Somen Mishra was working at Dharma. He is always on the lookout for new writing and great writing. He had these 50-60 pages written by two people – Saurabh Bharat and Vishal Wagh. Anubhuti (Kashyap) was already into the project. I had a meeting with Somen and Anubhuti and they shared the idea with me that a man goes into the gynac department and in the process, he changes. And I said, “That’s a great idea.” What was already on paper is a lot of research but we needed to create a coherent story. We needed to see the man evolving beat by beat and not in a one-directional way. I thought he needed to evolve one step forward and two steps backward continuously over the course of this film. And to ensure that it happens smoothly was my job on the project and I did that. In the journey were Somen Mishra and Anubhuti Kashyap. Then Somen Mishra left that company and Anup Pandey got involved in the project. The film was in cold storage for a while and then suddenly, it came back on the table one day. I wrote the first draft in 2017 and the next one in 2021. I remember this incident when we were narrating the script to Vicky Kaushal (eventually Ayushman Khurrana played that role). He said there is so much one step forward and two step backward happening but at some point, it should also be two steps forward; only then does it become a real journey. I thought that was valuable feedback. That’s when it stops being a small artsy film and looks at its heroism with more push to it.
From a film like Doctor G, allow me to move onto something in a totally different space – Pyaar Ka Punchnama. The film has its takers but is also criticized by some as being sexist. How much do you agree with that and what was the journey of writing it?
It was my first project. I had written a short film that Anurag (Kashyap) had read. He told me it is not a film, it is a play. I said, “It breaks my heart but I think it is a film.” One-and-a-half years later, I made a 30-minute short film out of the same script and showed it to him. Anurag said, “Your scriptwriting is off and the performances aren’t great.” But he also said, “You proved me wrong. I didn’t see a film in it but you saw it. And now I think it is a film and not a play.” That gave me a lot of confidence. He also praised my dialogue writing and told me he would recommend me. Within a week, I got a call from Luv Ranjan to write a film which was Pyaar Ka Punchnama.
The accusations of it being a sexist film is something I completely agree with. Today, if you ask me, I would always want my writing to reflect my politics and not someone else’s. But back when Pyaar Ka Punchnama happened, I was 27 and working an IT job, trying to find my way as a writer. I was approached by Luv Ranjan for this project. He had a vision where he wanted to make a certain kind of film. He was inspired by Chris Rock’s brand of standup comedy and wanted to make a film in that space. Luv Ranjan made us – my co-writer Vaibhav and I – see some of that work. Chris Rock, at that point, did some work which could be labelled as sexist. This was 2009. It was even before Twitter existed, I think. I immediately knew that this wasn’t a film I would want to make myself ever. But it was the first time I was getting to see what it was like to be a professional writer. My intent was to write it as funny as I could. During the process, I did suggest to Luv Ranjan that this could be a Woody Allen kind of a film where the boys talk about what they go through in a relationship and the girls talk about what they go through. But Luv was very clear in his vision and wanted to make it the way he wanted to, which I think is fair because it was his idea. Now, do I regret writing that film? Absolutely not. Would I want to write something like this again? Not at all. My job was to make the film funny and I did make it funny – at least as funny as I could. And I did bring life to the characters – at least, the male characters. And also, was it a success for me in my career? Hundred per cent. After that, I started receiving 17 phone calls a day from people who told me, “Let’s make a Delhi-based boys flick” and all that. Of course, I didn’t take up any of those projects.
What’s the strangest feedback you have had to hear as a writer?
These days, I don’t hear the strange things. Earlier in my career, I used to hear them a lot. But honestly, I used to zone out in all those meetings, which, in retrospect, is a good thing. I don’t remember them at all to be honest.
How did you navigate rejections in the early part of your career?
I’ll tell you something which I wish every young screenwriter would know. When I started out, there were a lot of small production houses that were popping up. All across Versova and Andheri were production houses everywhere. It took me a long time to know which one to go to with my work. Sometimes we get rejected because we are trying to sell our script to the wrong person. It’s the person who is wrong, not the story. And actually, it’s not that difficult. If you write an email with a synopsis of your story to the right people, they will respond. Looking back, I think I was caught in a limbo of approaching the wrong people with my stories, working on wrong ideas with the wrong people who had neither the capacity to make a film nor, very often, the real intention to do so. I tried to shake them up and make them want to make a film, which was not healthy. I think, after Pyaar Ka Punchnama, I should have gone to the right people with the right ideas and those ideas would have been entertained. If today, I were to conduct a workshop for screenwriters about screenwriting, it would not be about how to write better; it would be about how to pitch their ideas better.
Well, let’s say you don’t know anyone. You don’t know the heads of Junglee Pictures or Dharma or any production houses and studios. I think you could still approach a writer who would know them and writers usually help other writers. People send me material to read and I try and respond to them. It helps me discover new writers. In fact, I am looking for new writers so that I can set up writing rooms for a few projects. But to those who are young, I think reaching out to people and understanding how the system works is very important.
Where do you stand on the whole arthouse vs commercial debate?
You know, I love to watch Aankhon Dekhi time and again. If given a chance, I would love to write an Aankhon Dekhi even if I don’t get paid for it. I wrote a film called Geeli Pucchi which is part of Ajeeb Dastans. Without Netflix that film wouldn’t have been made. It’s a film I am very proud of and Neeraj Ghaywan did a really, really great job of directing it. So, if you ask me, I want an Aankhon Dekhi to exist and I want a Masaan to exist. As a creator, I love that. Very recently, I created a show called Kaalkoot. It’s got Vijay Varma and Shweta Tripathi in it. The show should be out by the end of July. And that, I think, is something I am really looking forward to from an artistic point of view. So, do great ideas get rejected? Probably, yes. But I would say, you should keep coming up with them. Sooner or later, you will have your moment. And that journey is also the fun of it. There is a line from a Charles Bukowski poem:
“To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it.
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.”
This is a line I swear by. If you ask me who my heroes are, I’d say, Gillian Flynn, Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Vince Gilligan. All these guys have been telling exceptionally complicated and profound stories. And they have done it with style. I find that heroic.
Look, as a creator, when you say that your story is non-commercial, you are in other words, saying that your story doesn’t have an audience or a limited audience. I find it truly heroic to say that I am going to tell you a very dangerous story to which, at least I believe, in my own delusion, that there is a huge audience.
The way we watch Korean films or Scandinavian shows, not too many people from those countries watch our work. Why do you think is the standard of Hindi films and shows not world-class?
I believe we can evoke and provoke people to develop an interest in original stories. I am not the right person to talk about the nature of pop culture or the reason for the success and the failure of films at the box office. I don’t have that skill. I don’t have a very good reading on it. There are people who have a great reading on it and they are successful. There is a similarity between politicians and successful filmmakers. The ability to read the masses is what both these sets of people have. But unfortunately, I don’t have the box office reading.
Geeli Pucchi was released to huge critical acclaim. What was the journey of writing that film?
Neeraj (Ghaywan) had a five-page long story for a very long time. One day, he shared it with me. What was really interesting is that I read it and I immediately had an idea on it. Neeraj’s story was that of a Dalit woman who was a psychopath and who manipulates a Brahmin woman into taking her job. In that version of the story, the Dalit woman was not gay and her intention was conning the Brahmin woman into getting a child. My point to Neeraj was that we are going to represent a Dalit and we are showing her as a psychopath. Now, I thought, right there, it’s wrong. Because anyway we don’t have enough representation of Dalits. Now, Neeraj does come from the Dalit community and he can show that world with a lot of empathy and lived experience, so I told him not to show a Dalit as a psychopath.
Secondly, conning an Indian woman into getting a child is not really a big deal. That is the patriarchal setup that she lives in and she is eventually going to have a child. If it were a woman who is working in New York or something, then conning her would be a big deal, from a story point of view. But I told him that it would become a great con if the Dalit woman were in love with the girl she was going to con. Initially, Neeraj didn’t agree with it, and I told him that I would write whatever he wanted me to write. I sat in his house for five days and wrote the film. Then I emailed him the story and told him that I was going to take a shower. When I went back, he felt betrayed because I had told him I’d write what he had asked me to but I ended up writing what I wanted to. But by now, he had gone through the emotional experience of reading the 35 pages that I had written and I went to him prepared with arguments about my point. Once I argued for my point and explained it to him, he bought it. That was a very good experience. I am so glad that Neeraj has such creative integrity that he bought my argument after seeing the merit in it.
About the film Hamid, there is a perception that the filmmaking did not do justice to the script. Do you agree?
Yes, I felt that way. But to be honest, Hamid was written by someone else. I am not the primary writer of the film. In fact, the film was already written when the Saregama people approached me. They said, “Can you save the film?” They felt that there was something powerful in it but it had to be reworked. So I reworked the script. But the original writer had a huge part in it and the original writer had done a fantastic job to a great degree. Now, the job was of the director to guide the writer to get over the line. But the director was failing to do so. So, the Saregama people told me that I don’t have to speak to the director or the original writer. They asked me to just go and do my own thing and I did my own thing.
What is success to you as a writer?
I think writing a good story is about finding and then submitting yourself to the emotional truth of the story. There is another process which is very similar to this – the process of praying. The act of praying is submitting your being to a larger being and the act of writing is to submit your being to a story which is larger than you. That’s why I think that stories are prayers that we make to other human beings. And if you are able to move collective consciousness a little bit through your stories, you are successful. Just like Charles Darwin, as I said earlier, told us where we came from, and changed our perception about who we are. If in the last eight years, I have dealt with masculinity and gender politics, in the next 10 years, I intend to deal with the nature of intelligence, what is the emotional value of intelligence and where it leaves us. There is another question that I am exploring which is “What is the relationship between the nature of intelligence and the binary nature of gender?” I think there is a deep connection between the two. The only intelligent species that we have largely has a binary nature of gender. Does gender fluidity change our neurological architecture in a fashion that also changes our intelligence? That’s going to be a big, big question in the years to come.
What are the films that have influenced you as a writer?
Back when I was growing up, we didn’t have TV at home. It was in 2005 that my friend Siddharth Agarwal – the person upon whom Vijay Varma’s character in Cheers is based – introduced me to films. Here are the exact films that made me come to Mumbai: The Arshad Warsi-starrer Sehar, Vishal Bharadwaj’s Maqbool, Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaron Khawahishein Aisi, Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday and Gulaal, and then two films by Chandan Arora – Main Meri Patni Aur Woh and Main Madhuri Dixit Banana Chahti Hoon. I watched all these films while I was in college. At that time, Gulaal was just about 80% made and I met Anurag accidentally in Delhi and he said, “Let me show you a film which isn’t released.” He showed me that film on DVD and I was blown away by Piyush Mishra’s poetry and the overall madness in the film. I love Gulaal.
Then, when I was working my IT job, I used to watch two-three films every day. Films by Asghar Farhadi, Fatih Akin and the list goes on. There are filmmakers whose names I don’t remember who changed my life.
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’
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Did you always want to be a writer?
I was born and raised in Lucknow. My family wasn’t into literature as such except that my grandfather was interested in Urdu poetry. My school group was interested in fiction. We would read books and discuss them at length. I did start writing pretty early. I wrote my first play in the sixth standard. There was a story called Waseehat; one day, my friend and I sat on the last bench and wrote an English adaptation of it. I kept writing in school, but it was only when I went to college, which was IIT Varanasi, that I started writing regularly. I went to IIT not because I wanted to get into a fancy institute or a fancy job at the end of it but because I was interested in physics and mathematics. It was genuine curiosity that led me to IIT. I had some unanswered questions while I was growing up and thought the answers to them lay in science. It was only after going to IIT that I realized that those answers may lie in art. If science could not answer a few of my questions, maybe fiction could.
Vijay Verma has articulated some of those questions very well in a series called Cheers. It’s probably one of his finest performances ever and both of us are very passionate about the series. One of the questions that was on my mind was “How to live in a fashion where internal turbulence is minimized?” I still haven’t found the exact answers to these questions. But there is a longer philosophical quest that I am on to find them. I have a theory of my own about this which I call The HMS Beagle Theory. Let me tell you a story: In the 19th century, a guy got onto a ship called the HMS Beagle and with a small crew, he went from one island to another, sailing in difficult waters. He picked up animals, dissected them and made drawings of their anatomy. About 10 to 15 years later, he came up with the theory of evolution. That guy was Charles Darwin. My theory is that by taking a dangerous journey, he added an inch to human consciousness and awareness. Without his theory, we would be a dumber race. I believe it would be good for every person to have their own HMS Beagle and have their own sea. If you have your own ship and your own sea, it’s easier to go through life, and you might even end up discovering something that adds something to our knowledge as a race. I think the quest of life, at least of my life, is to find truth. And the more truth you know, the less turbulent your life will be.
Being a writer with a keen interest in science, what’s your take on the advent of AI in the field of creativity?
You know, I have never given up on my scientific pursuit. I still code and I am still trying to learn to code. I am trying to learn Python currently. I think with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), every artist who wants to stay relevant will have to learn how to code. I am predicting this and hopefully it will be true and in the next three to five years, we will be watching a film in a cinema hall that is written and made entirely by AI. Very soon, Netflix will have a separate section for films that are entirely generated by AI. That is inevitable.
Do you think AI taking over creativity is progress or regression for society?
I think it is progress. For you to be relevant as an artist in the world of AI, whether your art is text-based, visual-based or music-based, you will have to be ferociously original. If you are truly original, you will be relevant. Because currently, what AI does is use precedence and adapt it in its own ways. It is not creating something ferociously original. But in a world like that, if you are mediocre, you will die. AI will eat you up with the sheer speed at which it functions. It’s going to push the limits of all those people who intend to be original. And all this will happen in the rather near future. Then, as it is predicted when AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) comes in by 2029, it will be able to think on its own and start creating original ideas and films. One big fear I have with this is that whatever you can do, AGI will do it faster and better. At this point, you would have no reward for creation. And once there is no reward to be had, human intelligence might stop being curious and original. That would lead to a kind of intellectual laziness.
If you allow me, let me float a radical idea. Look, DNA is 4.5 billion years old. We physically evolved into what we are today over the course of this time. Simultaneously our frontal lobe was being developed, the language circuit in our brain got developed. We first mechanized physical labour. Then we mechanized the intellect using computers. Now, when AGI is up and running, we might need to change our own biology. We might need to change our own neurology. Imagine a person with four hands, for example. Would they not play the guitar better than someone with just two? I think this is the kind of stuff we will getting into in the next 200 years or so. If you have heard of CRIPSR – the DNA-altering technology – we are already moving in that direction.
Your most critically acclaimed film so far is Doctor G. Could you run me through the journey of writing and conceptualizing it?
Somen Mishra was working at Dharma. He is always on the lookout for new writing and great writing. He had these 50-60 pages written by two people – Saurabh Bharat and Vishal Wagh. Anubhuti (Kashyap) was already into the project. I had a meeting with Somen and Anubhuti and they shared the idea with me that a man goes into the gynac department and in the process, he changes. And I said, “That’s a great idea.” What was already on paper is a lot of research but we needed to create a coherent story. We needed to see the man evolving beat by beat and not in a one-directional way. I thought he needed to evolve one step forward and two steps backward continuously over the course of this film. And to ensure that it happens smoothly was my job on the project and I did that. In the journey were Somen Mishra and Anubhuti Kashyap. Then Somen Mishra left that company and Anup Pandey got involved in the project. The film was in cold storage for a while and then suddenly, it came back on the table one day. I wrote the first draft in 2017 and the next one in 2021. I remember this incident when we were narrating the script to Vicky Kaushal (eventually Ayushman Khurrana played that role). He said there is so much one step forward and two step backward happening but at some point, it should also be two steps forward; only then does it become a real journey. I thought that was valuable feedback. That’s when it stops being a small artsy film and looks at its heroism with more push to it.
From a film like Doctor G, allow me to move onto something in a totally different space – Pyaar Ka Punchnama. The film has its takers but is also criticized by some as being sexist. How much do you agree with that and what was the journey of writing it?
It was my first project. I had written a short film that Anurag (Kashyap) had read. He told me it is not a film, it is a play. I said, “It breaks my heart but I think it is a film.” One-and-a-half years later, I made a 30-minute short film out of the same script and showed it to him. Anurag said, “Your scriptwriting is off and the performances aren’t great.” But he also said, “You proved me wrong. I didn’t see a film in it but you saw it. And now I think it is a film and not a play.” That gave me a lot of confidence. He also praised my dialogue writing and told me he would recommend me. Within a week, I got a call from Luv Ranjan to write a film which was Pyaar Ka Punchnama.
The accusations of it being a sexist film is something I completely agree with. Today, if you ask me, I would always want my writing to reflect my politics and not someone else’s. But back when Pyaar Ka Punchnama happened, I was 27 and working an IT job, trying to find my way as a writer. I was approached by Luv Ranjan for this project. He had a vision where he wanted to make a certain kind of film. He was inspired by Chris Rock’s brand of standup comedy and wanted to make a film in that space. Luv Ranjan made us – my co-writer Vaibhav and I – see some of that work. Chris Rock, at that point, did some work which could be labelled as sexist. This was 2009. It was even before Twitter existed, I think. I immediately knew that this wasn’t a film I would want to make myself ever. But it was the first time I was getting to see what it was like to be a professional writer. My intent was to write it as funny as I could. During the process, I did suggest to Luv Ranjan that this could be a Woody Allen kind of a film where the boys talk about what they go through in a relationship and the girls talk about what they go through. But Luv was very clear in his vision and wanted to make it the way he wanted to, which I think is fair because it was his idea. Now, do I regret writing that film? Absolutely not. Would I want to write something like this again? Not at all. My job was to make the film funny and I did make it funny – at least as funny as I could. And I did bring life to the characters – at least, the male characters. And also, was it a success for me in my career? Hundred per cent. After that, I started receiving 17 phone calls a day from people who told me, “Let’s make a Delhi-based boys flick” and all that. Of course, I didn’t take up any of those projects.
What’s the strangest feedback you have had to hear as a writer?
These days, I don’t hear the strange things. Earlier in my career, I used to hear them a lot. But honestly, I used to zone out in all those meetings, which, in retrospect, is a good thing. I don’t remember them at all to be honest.
How did you navigate rejections in the early part of your career?
I’ll tell you something which I wish every young screenwriter would know. When I started out, there were a lot of small production houses that were popping up. All across Versova and Andheri were production houses everywhere. It took me a long time to know which one to go to with my work. Sometimes we get rejected because we are trying to sell our script to the wrong person. It’s the person who is wrong, not the story. And actually, it’s not that difficult. If you write an email with a synopsis of your story to the right people, they will respond. Looking back, I think I was caught in a limbo of approaching the wrong people with my stories, working on wrong ideas with the wrong people who had neither the capacity to make a film nor, very often, the real intention to do so. I tried to shake them up and make them want to make a film, which was not healthy. I think, after Pyaar Ka Punchnama, I should have gone to the right people with the right ideas and those ideas would have been entertained. If today, I were to conduct a workshop for screenwriters about screenwriting, it would not be about how to write better; it would be about how to pitch their ideas better.
Well, let’s say you don’t know anyone. You don’t know the heads of Junglee Pictures or Dharma or any production houses and studios. I think you could still approach a writer who would know them and writers usually help other writers. People send me material to read and I try and respond to them. It helps me discover new writers. In fact, I am looking for new writers so that I can set up writing rooms for a few projects. But to those who are young, I think reaching out to people and understanding how the system works is very important.
Where do you stand on the whole arthouse vs commercial debate?
You know, I love to watch Aankhon Dekhi time and again. If given a chance, I would love to write an Aankhon Dekhi even if I don’t get paid for it. I wrote a film called Geeli Pucchi which is part of Ajeeb Dastans. Without Netflix that film wouldn’t have been made. It’s a film I am very proud of and Neeraj Ghaywan did a really, really great job of directing it. So, if you ask me, I want an Aankhon Dekhi to exist and I want a Masaan to exist. As a creator, I love that. Very recently, I created a show called Kaalkoot. It’s got Vijay Varma and Shweta Tripathi in it. The show should be out by the end of July. And that, I think, is something I am really looking forward to from an artistic point of view. So, do great ideas get rejected? Probably, yes. But I would say, you should keep coming up with them. Sooner or later, you will have your moment. And that journey is also the fun of it. There is a line from a Charles Bukowski poem:
“To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it.
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.”
This is a line I swear by. If you ask me who my heroes are, I’d say, Gillian Flynn, Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Vince Gilligan. All these guys have been telling exceptionally complicated and profound stories. And they have done it with style. I find that heroic.
Look, as a creator, when you say that your story is non-commercial, you are in other words, saying that your story doesn’t have an audience or a limited audience. I find it truly heroic to say that I am going to tell you a very dangerous story to which, at least I believe, in my own delusion, that there is a huge audience.
The way we watch Korean films or Scandinavian shows, not too many people from those countries watch our work. Why do you think is the standard of Hindi films and shows not world-class?
I believe we can evoke and provoke people to develop an interest in original stories. I am not the right person to talk about the nature of pop culture or the reason for the success and the failure of films at the box office. I don’t have that skill. I don’t have a very good reading on it. There are people who have a great reading on it and they are successful. There is a similarity between politicians and successful filmmakers. The ability to read the masses is what both these sets of people have. But unfortunately, I don’t have the box office reading.
Geeli Pucchi was released to huge critical acclaim. What was the journey of writing that film?
Neeraj (Ghaywan) had a five-page long story for a very long time. One day, he shared it with me. What was really interesting is that I read it and I immediately had an idea on it. Neeraj’s story was that of a Dalit woman who was a psychopath and who manipulates a Brahmin woman into taking her job. In that version of the story, the Dalit woman was not gay and her intention was conning the Brahmin woman into getting a child. My point to Neeraj was that we are going to represent a Dalit and we are showing her as a psychopath. Now, I thought, right there, it’s wrong. Because anyway we don’t have enough representation of Dalits. Now, Neeraj does come from the Dalit community and he can show that world with a lot of empathy and lived experience, so I told him not to show a Dalit as a psychopath.
Secondly, conning an Indian woman into getting a child is not really a big deal. That is the patriarchal setup that she lives in and she is eventually going to have a child. If it were a woman who is working in New York or something, then conning her would be a big deal, from a story point of view. But I told him that it would become a great con if the Dalit woman were in love with the girl she was going to con. Initially, Neeraj didn’t agree with it, and I told him that I would write whatever he wanted me to write. I sat in his house for five days and wrote the film. Then I emailed him the story and told him that I was going to take a shower. When I went back, he felt betrayed because I had told him I’d write what he had asked me to but I ended up writing what I wanted to. But by now, he had gone through the emotional experience of reading the 35 pages that I had written and I went to him prepared with arguments about my point. Once I argued for my point and explained it to him, he bought it. That was a very good experience. I am so glad that Neeraj has such creative integrity that he bought my argument after seeing the merit in it.
About the film Hamid, there is a perception that the filmmaking did not do justice to the script. Do you agree?
Yes, I felt that way. But to be honest, Hamid was written by someone else. I am not the primary writer of the film. In fact, the film was already written when the Saregama people approached me. They said, “Can you save the film?” They felt that there was something powerful in it but it had to be reworked. So I reworked the script. But the original writer had a huge part in it and the original writer had done a fantastic job to a great degree. Now, the job was of the director to guide the writer to get over the line. But the director was failing to do so. So, the Saregama people told me that I don’t have to speak to the director or the original writer. They asked me to just go and do my own thing and I did my own thing.
What is success to you as a writer?
I think writing a good story is about finding and then submitting yourself to the emotional truth of the story. There is another process which is very similar to this – the process of praying. The act of praying is submitting your being to a larger being and the act of writing is to submit your being to a story which is larger than you. That’s why I think that stories are prayers that we make to other human beings. And if you are able to move collective consciousness a little bit through your stories, you are successful. Just like Charles Darwin, as I said earlier, told us where we came from, and changed our perception about who we are. If in the last eight years, I have dealt with masculinity and gender politics, in the next 10 years, I intend to deal with the nature of intelligence, what is the emotional value of intelligence and where it leaves us. There is another question that I am exploring which is “What is the relationship between the nature of intelligence and the binary nature of gender?” I think there is a deep connection between the two. The only intelligent species that we have largely has a binary nature of gender. Does gender fluidity change our neurological architecture in a fashion that also changes our intelligence? That’s going to be a big, big question in the years to come.
What are the films that have influenced you as a writer?
Back when I was growing up, we didn’t have TV at home. It was in 2005 that my friend Siddharth Agarwal – the person upon whom Vijay Varma’s character in Cheers is based – introduced me to films. Here are the exact films that made me come to Mumbai: The Arshad Warsi-starrer Sehar, Vishal Bharadwaj’s Maqbool, Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaron Khawahishein Aisi, Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday and Gulaal, and then two films by Chandan Arora – Main Meri Patni Aur Woh and Main Madhuri Dixit Banana Chahti Hoon. I watched all these films while I was in college. At that time, Gulaal was just about 80% made and I met Anurag accidentally in Delhi and he said, “Let me show you a film which isn’t released.” He showed me that film on DVD and I was blown away by Piyush Mishra’s poetry and the overall madness in the film. I love Gulaal.
Then, when I was working my IT job, I used to watch two-three films every day. Films by Asghar Farhadi, Fatih Akin and the list goes on. There are filmmakers whose names I don’t remember who changed my life.
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’
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