The 40-year-old, who describes himself as an accidental filmmaker, is easy to speak with, eager to express his love for film, and full of praise for his collaborators. Despite nearly two decades in the industry—he started as an AD on the sets of Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006)—he says he’s still in his honeymoon phase of loving film and thrilled about the two projects he is currently working on: one, a Romeo and Juliet-esque love story set in rural India, the other a horror movie about a same-sex couple attempting to have a child. With Stolen now streaming on Prime Video for the world to see, the filmmaker chats with The Nod about his creative process, flawed filmmaking, and youthful idealism.
You call yourself an accidental filmmaker and originally wanted to be a professional polo player. How did your interests shift to film?
I started playing polo when I was about 10 and played professionally throughout college, but I didn’t have an understanding of what it would mean to make a career out of it. When I first began working in film, it was only because I had friends in Mumbai whom I could stay with. I grabbed my suitcase and moved here from Delhi to look for a job. For the first few years, it was more about the job than filmmaking itself. It wasn’t like I had a deep-seated yearning to make movies. That came later.
What was the process of writing Stolen? Did you always know what the story would be?
In 2018, I came across the story of the Karbi Anglong lynching in Assam and began to dig deeper. Initially, it wasn’t even because I wanted to make a film. I was just trying to understand what was going on, where this anger came from. The story stayed in my mind for almost two years before we started working on it more seriously as a screenplay. Every part of Stolen—whether it’s the child kidnapping, misinformation or lack of trust in the justice system—revolves around the phenomenon of WhatsApp lynching. I always knew I wanted to tell two sides of the story: one of the brothers who were lynched, and the other of the mob. I never saw the mob as villains, because as soon as you unpeel a layer or two, you see that they’re victims of the situation as well. Because you can’t tell the story of an entire mob, I chose to focus on an individual: Jhumpa, the impoverished mother whose baby is kidnapped. She needs to form a mob because alone she doesn’t have agency or power in the country.
What was the toughest scene to shoot?
There was a particular scene in a car that I wanted to shoot during golden hour in the morning. I didn’t want a cut so the viewers could see the transition from night to day and get a sense of real time. The moment you decide you want to shoot something at golden hour, you can’t have multiple shots. You only get 15 to 20 minutes a day. We did a few rehearsals, then broke it down: if we shot for five minutes and took a couple of minutes to reset, we could get three takes during golden hour. So, for four mornings, we would go back to that location and shoot. It was completely hands-off directing because once the actors were in the car, everyone who wasn’t an actor had to hide in a corner. We weren’t even getting video feed because the car was so far off. In such moments, you can’t do anything but surrender, believe in the preparation you’ve done and, most importantly, believe in your collaborators.
What do you believe is the role of a filmmaker?
Throughout my life, I’ve been moved by films that made me rethink what I know about the world, question the status quo, and understand a different layer of humanity. Our job as filmmakers is to tell stories, and if our stories don’t have an impact I don’t see the point of sharing them. Because films require so much investment of both time and money as well as hundreds of people, I personally feel you have to use these resources to their best and create the highest impact possible. You have to work with subjects that are deeply personal to you. And personal is not just what’s going on in your life. It’s what you’re affected by, as I was by the injustice of the Karbi Anglong lynching.
As an artist, do you often look back at your work and find things you would change in hindsight?
When filmmakers look at their work, they can’t not see the flaws. After you shoot a film, all you do is look at the flaws over and over again because you need to fix them in post-production. But practically all films remain flawed. It’s the imperfections of our art that make people engage with it. And what makes the filmmaking process exciting is that you’re never able to get it right. You may spend all your life doing it and still not get it right. If you even land at 50 per cent of what you set out to make, you’ve made a good film.
Stolen was showcased for the first time in 2023. Since then, what has the process of releasing the film to the public looked like?
On one hand, Stolen played at 30 to 40 film festivals across the world, from South America to Japan. It was gratifying to see how much people loved it. On the other hand, it is a film of Indians, by Indians, for Indians, so we really wanted to reach more people here. It’s never easy to do that if you create something slightly different. I’m not saying Stolen is some avant-garde, never-been-done-before film, but it’s slightly different from what viewers have come to expect. It was ultimately the credibility and goodwill of our four executive producers—Anurag Kashyap, Kiran Rao, Nikkhil Advani and Vikramaditya Motwane—that really tipped the scales. When such stalwarts of Indian cinema banded together to help the film reach a larger audience, it reaffirmed my belief in this whole business a hundred times over. A lot of my idealism—which had eroded a bit over the years—is now back. I feel like I’m in my twenties again with all this youthful excitement about film.
Stolen is currently streaming on Prime Video
