Sudip Sharma, screenwriter ‘A writer-director relationship is a lot like dating’

I think everyone contributes to society in their own way. Even a person who drives a bus contributes to society. So, in that sense, there is a role that a screenwriter plays in society. It is also commensurate with the kind of role that art plays in society. At the end of the day, a screenwriter is a storyteller. And stories are what shape cultural narratives. Even the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are stories and have contributed to society in their own way. But I don’t think we should put the cart before the horse and forget the most important responsibility that lies with the screenwriter. The most important allegiance that a screenwriter has is to himself and to his stories. Your first responsibility as a screenwriter is to ensure that you are able to tell the story that you have chosen to tell.

How are the challenges that a contemporary screenwriter faces different from those faced by screenwriters of the past?

I think there is a lot more respect for screenwriting now, so in that sense, it is easier. If you look at it, apart from Salim sahab and Javed sahab, no screenwriter has been celebrated in India. Song writers are always more popular in India, even dialogue writers. But I don’t think too many people in the industry even understand the role of a screenwriter – the fact that he really is the architect of the film; the fact that he is the one laying down the grounds. Some of the blame for that lies with us screenwriters as well because we didn’t give them the kind of confidence or the material that would make them sit up and think, “Hey, this guy is building a world through his words or he is building a story block by block.” It’s not really the director who is telling the story first. It’s the screenwriter who is telling the story first and then it’s the director who is building on it. So because of all these historical reasons, the screenwriter hasn’t earned that emphasis in India, but things have improved. When I started writing, about 18-20 years ago, screenwriting was just opening up as a topic of discussion. I think Satya was the film that made people sit up and take notice of the screenwriting of it.

Satya was in 1998; it took us about a hundred years to get there. Maybe it happened with Bandit Queen a little before that. So it started off in the late 1990s and then in the early 2000s, some of the work that Vishal (Bharadwaj) did or people like Anurag (Kashyap) or Jaideep Sahani did, brought a sort of a healthy discussion around screenwriting. I think one way of showing respect to a profession is by showing money. It’s only in the last five years or so that money has come into screenwriting. That’s in contrast with the time when I wrote scripts for free, wrote scripts for food or for an incredibly low amount of money. Now, when you see even young screenwriters walking in and demanding their fair share, it’s great. In terms of the challenges, I think, there is so much work happening right now that keeping the quality intact could be a task, especially under pressure to submit work sooner than it should be submitted. Another challenge of today is telling a story that you really want to and in the way you really want to instead of falling into the rut of writing another nationalist drama, which seems to be the flavour of the decade. Do I go against the grain and tell a story which is really appealing to me as a person?

I think this deserves a more nuanced look. To begin with, yes, it is partly true that film is a director’s medium. But then we are talking about film. If you look at long-form storytelling, if you look at OTT shows or TV even, it is a writer’s medium. And yes, film may be a director’s medium but how do we know of Aaron Sorkin or Charlie Kauffman or Salim-Javed? There are so many writers who have made a mark. If you do great work and if your work pushes through these notions that we may have about screenwriting, you can make a mark. I think creating a film out of nothing is a great privilege as well as a great responsibility. When there was nothing, as a writer, you created something. Everyone comes in the process after you. In fact, the film itself comes into existence after the writer comes on board. That makes you more than a supporting role. You are a mother. The child may grow up and find a girlfriend or find many girlfriends later but a writer is the mother of a film.

With huge corporate houses commissioning films and shows, is there too much interference now in the writer’s creative process?

Look, if you have worked a bit and your work has earned some respect, they let you be. I am working on my third series right now and more or less they let me be. Yes, they would tell me what they think of what I have written or what we have shot but if you give them strong, rational arguments, they let you be. At the same time, we must understand that when someone is investing crores and crores of rupees in a project, they are going to ask you a few questions and you have to know how to answer them and navigate around those. I wouldn’t belittle the point of view of a platform because they are just doing their job and as a screenwriter when you fight it out or stick to what you believe in, you are doing your job.

How easy do you think is it for a young writer without a proven track record to approach OTTs or get something made?

You have to write a great spec script that doesn’t cost anything and pitch it around. I didn’t start with a proven track record. When Navdeep (Singh) and I were pitching Nh10 around 12 years ago, there was no producer and no money. So we pitched it around and then it reached producers and eventually it reached Anushka (Sharma) and got made.I would say it is easier to be a 25-year-old screenwriter with no proven record than being a 25-year-old cinematographer with no proven record. Because, as a screenwriter, I can write a script at home and someone reads it and says, “Wow, I want to make it.” Also, now there are agencies who get young writers on board and pitch their work for a percentage. The only thing they ask for is a spec script. Most of the time, when writers say that no one is reading their script, trust me, there is always someone reading the first page. When a script comes to me, I always read the first page and then decide if I want to read further or not. You can tell, in one page, whether the person knows how to write or not. If you don’t know to construct a scene or how to write dialogue well, trust me, nobody is going to be interested. The fact is that the world doesn’t owe you anything.

Nh10 was critically acclaimed. Could you run me through the journey of its writing?The genesis of the idea came from Navdeep. And at that point, both of us were interested in the class structure that exists in society. In fact, I still am interested in that. At that time, it was more fascinating for me because I was trying to understand my own privileges or the man-woman divide or the rural-urban divide in the country. I was also interested in what hot money or instant money had done to Gurgaon. I had spent about five years in Delhi and Navdeep is from Delhi. So, initially, it was about understanding what was going on. Then it became an idea about a woman in peril and the place of a woman in society. At that point, there was also a lot of anger inside me, the frustration that came with trying to pitch scripts for 10 years and thinking that nobody was reading them. We were two angry men wanting to tell a story about a woman. The film does have a male gaze and beyond point, I can’t help it but we were trying to tell the story with some amount of empathy at least even if not from the deepest understanding.

A writer-director relationship is a lot like dating. You meet a lot of people and then you finally hit it off with someone. It’s also a very intimate relationship. You end up spending so much time with each other, you end up sharing so many of your ideas and thoughts. Yes, it involves a lot of fights as well but I think the two people need to have a similar world view at least.

Chaubey happened to read Nh10 and then he pitched an idea to me and then Udta Punjab happened. We really enjoyed working together on Udta Punjab and then wanted to do another film together. That’s when Sonchiriya came along. In fact, we used to always tell each other that we should do three films together. Because the first is when you start understanding each other, the second is when you really get each other, and the equation is great and the third is when the fallout starts as you have outgrown each other. We still have a third film pending and I hope we come up with something soon.

With Udta Punjab, how did you attract stars to a script that’s rather dark for the Bollywood mainstream?

You know, it’s funny because I didn’t write either Nh10 or Udta Punjab with a star in mind. I was always writing the film I wanted to see. Honestly, I had no interest in taking it to a star. Till today, I have no interest in taking anything to a star. It’s always about writing the script first and then thinking about who fits the role best. I’ll be very happy if it’s a great actor. That’s all I require. At the same time, you can’t underestimate the power that a star brings to a film. Also, I was quite lucky to have the stars because, as you rightly said, these are not the kind of films that they normally do. But for some reason they did. I am no judge of my own work but my friend Avinash (Arun) tells me that the reason why my work has attracted stars and some amount of mainstream appreciation as well is that although it is pretty intense, there is a larger viewpoint that is at play, which people connect with.

For me, Paatal Lok is about a lot of things and it also tries to explore some questions that I was grappling with such as who we are as a country and where we are headed. The character of Hathiram gives us an insight into the different worlds that I was trying to explore, the three worlds as we called them in the show: Swarg lok, Dharti Lok and Paatal Lok.

Since you are now working on the second season of Paatal Lok, was it always planned that way?I was always clear that there will only be one season of Paatal Lok. I was done in my head and to me, the story was complete. And I like the idea of complete stories. I don’t like cliffhangers. It was only on the edit of the first season that I felt that I was not done with Hathiram. I sort of fell in love with the character of Hathiram Chaudhary and with the actor (Jaideep Ahlawat) who was playing it. It’s that character which is purely the reason why I decided to do the second season. I took my time to find the story, which is why it will take four years for the second season to come. The first story is over. I wanted to understand in the second season where he is now, where the people around him are, and where he sees himself in relation to that. I would rather take my time than just do something hastily because the world wants me to do it.

Why do we lag behind many other countries in terms of quality in the longer format?I think many other countries have had a long tradition of long-form storytelling and we don’t. Sopranos came out on HBO in 1999; The Wire came out in 2001; West Wing was in the 1990s and Aaron Sorkin was writing it. They have had a 20-30 year head start on us. Having said that, I think it’s also because of the fact that screenwriting is not considered an art form in India. We rarely paid attention to it at all. Our films have mostly been about song and dance or about who is the hero and who is the heroine. Just look at the conversations that happen around a film. For the last 30 years, when they were making The Wire and The Sopranos, we were discussing which item girl to put in our film. It’s going to take a lot of time to come out of that and we have only begun about six years ago. You know, we have to catch up with. We need to work harder.

Among the shows that are out there in the world, name one show that you wish you had made. I’ll name two: The Wire and The Sopranos. If I had made even one of them, I think I would never touch my laptop again or would never write a single word again. I’d happily retire.

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’

I think everyone contributes to society in their own way. Even a person who drives a bus contributes to society. So, in that sense, there is a role that a screenwriter plays in society. It is also commensurate with the kind of role that art plays in society. At the end of the day, a screenwriter is a storyteller. And stories are what shape cultural narratives. Even the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are stories and have contributed to society in their own way. But I don’t think we should put the cart before the horse and forget the most important responsibility that lies with the screenwriter. The most important allegiance that a screenwriter has is to himself and to his stories. Your first responsibility as a screenwriter is to ensure that you are able to tell the story that you have chosen to tell.

How are the challenges that a contemporary screenwriter faces different from those faced by screenwriters of the past?

I think there is a lot more respect for screenwriting now, so in that sense, it is easier. If you look at it, apart from Salim sahab and Javed sahab, no screenwriter has been celebrated in India. Song writers are always more popular in India, even dialogue writers. But I don’t think too many people in the industry even understand the role of a screenwriter – the fact that he really is the architect of the film; the fact that he is the one laying down the grounds. Some of the blame for that lies with us screenwriters as well because we didn’t give them the kind of confidence or the material that would make them sit up and think, “Hey, this guy is building a world through his words or he is building a story block by block.” It’s not really the director who is telling the story first. It’s the screenwriter who is telling the story first and then it’s the director who is building on it. So because of all these historical reasons, the screenwriter hasn’t earned that emphasis in India, but things have improved. When I started writing, about 18-20 years ago, screenwriting was just opening up as a topic of discussion. I think Satya was the film that made people sit up and take notice of the screenwriting of it.

Satya was in 1998; it took us about a hundred years to get there. Maybe it happened with Bandit Queen a little before that. So it started off in the late 1990s and then in the early 2000s, some of the work that Vishal (Bharadwaj) did or people like Anurag (Kashyap) or Jaideep Sahani did, brought a sort of a healthy discussion around screenwriting. I think one way of showing respect to a profession is by showing money. It’s only in the last five years or so that money has come into screenwriting. That’s in contrast with the time when I wrote scripts for free, wrote scripts for food or for an incredibly low amount of money. Now, when you see even young screenwriters walking in and demanding their fair share, it’s great. In terms of the challenges, I think, there is so much work happening right now that keeping the quality intact could be a task, especially under pressure to submit work sooner than it should be submitted. Another challenge of today is telling a story that you really want to and in the way you really want to instead of falling into the rut of writing another nationalist drama, which seems to be the flavour of the decade. Do I go against the grain and tell a story which is really appealing to me as a person?

I think this deserves a more nuanced look. To begin with, yes, it is partly true that film is a director’s medium. But then we are talking about film. If you look at long-form storytelling, if you look at OTT shows or TV even, it is a writer’s medium. And yes, film may be a director’s medium but how do we know of Aaron Sorkin or Charlie Kauffman or Salim-Javed? There are so many writers who have made a mark. If you do great work and if your work pushes through these notions that we may have about screenwriting, you can make a mark. I think creating a film out of nothing is a great privilege as well as a great responsibility. When there was nothing, as a writer, you created something. Everyone comes in the process after you. In fact, the film itself comes into existence after the writer comes on board. That makes you more than a supporting role. You are a mother. The child may grow up and find a girlfriend or find many girlfriends later but a writer is the mother of a film.

With huge corporate houses commissioning films and shows, is there too much interference now in the writer’s creative process?

Look, if you have worked a bit and your work has earned some respect, they let you be. I am working on my third series right now and more or less they let me be. Yes, they would tell me what they think of what I have written or what we have shot but if you give them strong, rational arguments, they let you be. At the same time, we must understand that when someone is investing crores and crores of rupees in a project, they are going to ask you a few questions and you have to know how to answer them and navigate around those. I wouldn’t belittle the point of view of a platform because they are just doing their job and as a screenwriter when you fight it out or stick to what you believe in, you are doing your job.

How easy do you think is it for a young writer without a proven track record to approach OTTs or get something made?

You have to write a great spec script that doesn’t cost anything and pitch it around. I didn’t start with a proven track record. When Navdeep (Singh) and I were pitching Nh10 around 12 years ago, there was no producer and no money. So we pitched it around and then it reached producers and eventually it reached Anushka (Sharma) and got made.I would say it is easier to be a 25-year-old screenwriter with no proven record than being a 25-year-old cinematographer with no proven record. Because, as a screenwriter, I can write a script at home and someone reads it and says, “Wow, I want to make it.” Also, now there are agencies who get young writers on board and pitch their work for a percentage. The only thing they ask for is a spec script. Most of the time, when writers say that no one is reading their script, trust me, there is always someone reading the first page. When a script comes to me, I always read the first page and then decide if I want to read further or not. You can tell, in one page, whether the person knows how to write or not. If you don’t know to construct a scene or how to write dialogue well, trust me, nobody is going to be interested. The fact is that the world doesn’t owe you anything.

Nh10 was critically acclaimed. Could you run me through the journey of its writing?The genesis of the idea came from Navdeep. And at that point, both of us were interested in the class structure that exists in society. In fact, I still am interested in that. At that time, it was more fascinating for me because I was trying to understand my own privileges or the man-woman divide or the rural-urban divide in the country. I was also interested in what hot money or instant money had done to Gurgaon. I had spent about five years in Delhi and Navdeep is from Delhi. So, initially, it was about understanding what was going on. Then it became an idea about a woman in peril and the place of a woman in society. At that point, there was also a lot of anger inside me, the frustration that came with trying to pitch scripts for 10 years and thinking that nobody was reading them. We were two angry men wanting to tell a story about a woman. The film does have a male gaze and beyond point, I can’t help it but we were trying to tell the story with some amount of empathy at least even if not from the deepest understanding.

A writer-director relationship is a lot like dating. You meet a lot of people and then you finally hit it off with someone. It’s also a very intimate relationship. You end up spending so much time with each other, you end up sharing so many of your ideas and thoughts. Yes, it involves a lot of fights as well but I think the two people need to have a similar world view at least.

Chaubey happened to read Nh10 and then he pitched an idea to me and then Udta Punjab happened. We really enjoyed working together on Udta Punjab and then wanted to do another film together. That’s when Sonchiriya came along. In fact, we used to always tell each other that we should do three films together. Because the first is when you start understanding each other, the second is when you really get each other, and the equation is great and the third is when the fallout starts as you have outgrown each other. We still have a third film pending and I hope we come up with something soon.

With Udta Punjab, how did you attract stars to a script that’s rather dark for the Bollywood mainstream?

You know, it’s funny because I didn’t write either Nh10 or Udta Punjab with a star in mind. I was always writing the film I wanted to see. Honestly, I had no interest in taking it to a star. Till today, I have no interest in taking anything to a star. It’s always about writing the script first and then thinking about who fits the role best. I’ll be very happy if it’s a great actor. That’s all I require. At the same time, you can’t underestimate the power that a star brings to a film. Also, I was quite lucky to have the stars because, as you rightly said, these are not the kind of films that they normally do. But for some reason they did. I am no judge of my own work but my friend Avinash (Arun) tells me that the reason why my work has attracted stars and some amount of mainstream appreciation as well is that although it is pretty intense, there is a larger viewpoint that is at play, which people connect with.

For me, Paatal Lok is about a lot of things and it also tries to explore some questions that I was grappling with such as who we are as a country and where we are headed. The character of Hathiram gives us an insight into the different worlds that I was trying to explore, the three worlds as we called them in the show: Swarg lok, Dharti Lok and Paatal Lok.

Since you are now working on the second season of Paatal Lok, was it always planned that way?I was always clear that there will only be one season of Paatal Lok. I was done in my head and to me, the story was complete. And I like the idea of complete stories. I don’t like cliffhangers. It was only on the edit of the first season that I felt that I was not done with Hathiram. I sort of fell in love with the character of Hathiram Chaudhary and with the actor (Jaideep Ahlawat) who was playing it. It’s that character which is purely the reason why I decided to do the second season. I took my time to find the story, which is why it will take four years for the second season to come. The first story is over. I wanted to understand in the second season where he is now, where the people around him are, and where he sees himself in relation to that. I would rather take my time than just do something hastily because the world wants me to do it.

Why do we lag behind many other countries in terms of quality in the longer format?I think many other countries have had a long tradition of long-form storytelling and we don’t. Sopranos came out on HBO in 1999; The Wire came out in 2001; West Wing was in the 1990s and Aaron Sorkin was writing it. They have had a 20-30 year head start on us. Having said that, I think it’s also because of the fact that screenwriting is not considered an art form in India. We rarely paid attention to it at all. Our films have mostly been about song and dance or about who is the hero and who is the heroine. Just look at the conversations that happen around a film. For the last 30 years, when they were making The Wire and The Sopranos, we were discussing which item girl to put in our film. It’s going to take a lot of time to come out of that and we have only begun about six years ago. You know, we have to catch up with. We need to work harder.

Among the shows that are out there in the world, name one show that you wish you had made. I’ll name two: The Wire and The Sopranos. If I had made even one of them, I think I would never touch my laptop again or would never write a single word again. I’d happily retire.

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’