After lust, it’s games

I hope you don’t step out of your house on the 6th,” may have been a strange thing for a filmmaker to tell his prospective audience about the release date of his film a few years. But that’s exactly what Anurag Kashyap did as he spoke to an audience before the Bengaluru premiere of his and Vikramaditya Motwane’s Netflix series ‘Sacred Games’.

And that, if nothing else, should tell you how well online streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have extended their tentacles into the Indian entertainment market.

Just last month, the online streaming service had brought out ‘Lust Stories’, an anthology film about female sexuality that not only was a success but started a debate about how women’s desires are underrepresented in Indian cinema.

And that points to a trend the streamers are setting in the country. While Netflix seems to flow money into Hindi cinema, it’s not very hot for the traditional aesthetics of Bollywood. That may seem counter-intuitive to many. Bollywood’s mass appeal, it’s careful avoidance of anything intellectual, bleak and nuanced was why many young experimental filmmakers in the country, over generations, were told their films would not work. Escapism was the milch cow of traditional Bollywood capitalism.

So how does Netflix’s brand of capitalism prefer the niche over the mass, the nuance over the in-your-face and art over stardom, and still manage to work?

DH spoke to the directors while they were in Bengaluru to find some answers. The directors were in a very jovial mood and they laughed when the interview began by congratulating Kashyap on ‘Lust Stories’ and Motwane on the recent ‘Bhavesh Joshi Superhero’.

Excerpts from the interview:

How did the both of you divide Sacred Games between you?

Anurag: Most of your answers will come from Vikramaditya because he is the showrunner.

Vikramaditya: Anurag has directed the noir bits and I have directed the sad bits. As simple as that.

Sacred Games has done a lot of things your traditional Indian film wouldn’t do, such as introduce a sexualised transsexual character. The show is very dark and there’s more nudity than you would expect. Is that because you planned to cater to an international audience as well?

Vikramaditya: We planned to cater to every audience. We have been very responsible with the series. None of the nudity ventures beyond what is required for the story. At no point were we having fun for the sake of it or saying “Hey, we can have nudity, so let’s have nudity.” So the lack of censorship is great for the things we want to say and not so much for the things we want to show.

Talking about censorship, Sacred Games is also political. And you do make very strong political statements, such as those about Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. What that intentional? Did you want to make a political film?

Kashyap: We did not want to stay away from the politics of the times we live in or the politics in the journey of this (Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s) character. It is when you see the larger context of the film that the sense of it comes in.

There was a time when everyone held an opinion on the Emergency. If you want to see what the characters were thinking at the time of the Emergency, you need to show that in the film. The central character is talking from that point of view, we just didn’t want to shy away from the politics.

There are three things you absolutely cannot show in Indian cinema: sexuality, religion and politics. And those three things are so omnipresent in our lives. We didn’t want to step away from them while making the film. We wanted to engage with them.

I was wondering about what your influences in making the series are. I found some parallels with western shows like True Detective, where on top of the crime story, there is a character having philosophical ruminations about crime itself, as Nawazuddin’s character does in the film.

Vikramaditya: I haven’t watched True Detective.

Kashyap: I have watched True Detective. But this comes from the book. The book also begins that way. The only difference is that the series has been updated for 2017 and we have taken away a lot of things that did not fit in now. So, the idea of how to tell the story is kind of borrowed from the book.

Does the fact that the film is distributed by Netflix make it a little niche?

Kashyap: We have been told all our lives that we are niche. I have never believed that I am niche. But there was always the middleman telling me that I am niche. But the middleman is out here. I have a direct relationship with the audience.

Vikramaditya: What he is saying is right. No one is telling you, you can’t watch this. No one is telling you that there isn’t enough demand for us to distribute this film in this sort of place. It’s your relationship with Netflix. Do you want to see it? See it. You want to watch it at 7 am, 3 am, on the road, in the pot, wherever. It’s there for you.

Also, Netflix is catering to an audience that likes in-depth dramas. You are not catering to the lowest common denominator. We knew that right from the beginning. We are catering to an audience that wants to see something dramatic that is not in the cinemas. Isn’t that better?

But it does help the both of you in a sense because you generally deal with difficult topics, whether it be Udaan or Gangs of Wasseypur. I don’t think you have ever catered to the lowest common denominator.

Anurag: I think our audiences have always been on the internet. So Netflix feels like home.

Vikramaditya: In the cases of Gangs of Wasseypur or Udaan, if you take the box office versus the people who have actually watched the film, you’ll see that word-of-mouth travels further. The lowest common denominator? No. In the moment? No. But eventually, when the films actually develop their lives, enough people have seen them, they want to come back. It actually reaches the lowest common denominator also. Whether they have seen it on TV or through piracy… whatever it is. The people who have seen Gangs of Wasseypur and Udaan right now are huge as when you take into account all the years since the release. And the great thing about Netflix is that the material is there forever. The wonderful thing about this is that no one is going to tell me, which happens with movies all the time, “I really wanted to see your film but it wasn’t there in the theatre… or I really wanted to see your film but I couldn’t find the right show… I really wanted to see your film but…”

The premiere was held at the PVR forum in the evening, which Vikramaditya, Anurag, Nawazuddin and Radhika attended. While the other three left immediately after the speeches, Anurag stood at the entrance to the theatre at least for at least another ten minutes as just another silhouette among the huddled PVR workers trying to catch a glimpse of the show.