Reema Kagti on The Archies film: ‘Twenty years back my sensibility didn’t match the requirements of Bollywood’-Entertainment News , Firstpost

Writer-director Reema Kagti is largely considered one of the best working talents in Indian cinema, with a singular voice as an artist, screenwriter, and filmmaker. She has captured social issues, indigenous cultures, female identity, sexuality, nationalism, and oppression in both her narratives and feature films. Actor Aamir Khan once said, “Reema’s strength as a filmmaker is her honesty, she goes to the heart of the matter.”  Twenty years ago, she didn’t fit into the industry because her sensibility didn’t match the requirements of Bollywood.

Reema’s directorial debut, Honeymoon Travels Private Limited (2006), was an ensemble film that was an immediate commercial success. Reema then went on to write and direct the neo-noir Talaash (2012), and the historic sports drama Gold (2018), both of which were extremely well received by audiences and were critically acclaimed. As a writer, Reema knits her own viewpoint into her narratives, creating all characters with great presence and tenacity

Reema Kagti has a continuing a long- time partnership with Zoya Akhtar to bring audiences genre-bending belters such as Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Dil Dhadakne do, Made in Heaven Season 1 for Amazon Prime and India’s official entry in the Academy Awards-Gully Boy. More recently, the complemented collaborators have penned the script for the mega ensemble Jee le Zara, Made in Heaven Season2 and the most awaited feature film Archie-The musical for Netflix.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

Whose idea was it to bring back the world of Archies?

It was Netflix’s idea and both Zoya and I are huge fans of Archies. We grew up reading Archies’s comics and so when the idea was given to us, we just jumped at it.

In all your films and shows, women are shown to be flawed and vulnerable. Is it an exciting time for filmmakers and writers to bring out such stories?

Yes, this is the best time for cinema in terms of creative pleasure. But again, not just women, men are also shown as flawed. I think if you see traditionally, older films, the concept of a hero has changed. Earlier they would be unbelievably heroic, and good and they would be flawless. But that also doesn’t make for a very real character or a person that you can relate to.

There is still a lot of room for improvement in the representation of women. Having said that, things have changed. We are seeing women centric content and films. We are seeing some very strong women characters. I guess this is the need of the hour and that’s why it is happening.

Your journey as a filmmaker…

I am really grateful to this industry for giving me a home to do what I love. There have been difficulties for me at the beginning of my career.  Initially when I started working as an Assistant Director during my early days, things opened up a lot in the industry since then and the content and the entire concept of filmmaking have changed. When I started my journey in the industry people were still making those conventional masala Hindi movies. And my sensibility is different. I think the difficulty was that because I didn’t quite fit into what was the norm at that point.

In 2007, the year when my first film debuted, 50 new directors made their debut. That was because of the advent of multiplexes. And now OTT has added to it. It has kind of created an eco-system for all kinds of films and content to be shown. This has helped things open up. Twenty years ago, I didn’t fit into the industry, but now I do. So, personally, my challenge was that I think my sensibility didn’t match the requirements of the industry then.

 

Zoya and you are known for giving content-driven films and series. Is there a formula that you two follow?

You don’t start by thinking about whether our projects together are going to do well. You start with whether you connect with each other and whether you can connect with the content of the project. The first question that I ask myself before taking up a project is that do I as a director want to do this. And I feel if you like it there is a chance that other people will like it too. That’s how we start and that’s how we work. We never start with okay we need to crack some formula together to give a hit. And each time it is as nerve-racking as the first time.

On the process of writing the script with Zoya…

Since we are doing it for so long, we have become like a well-oiled machine. We have cracked it into three stages. The first stage is ideating, researching, meeting people, reading and internalising things that you need to write the story and the screenplay. The next stage is we start on the story. Very simply put it is a couple of lines from every scene from beginning to end.   In the research and the story stages, we primarily work together. After the story is done, we start working on the screenplay and that’s then I start writing it out and the pages are sent to Zoya. One of us kind of start working on the first draft. I send Zoya the pages and she add more layers to the characters. There is a lot of back and forth with the screenplay. Then comes the execution. So, it is just three stages of bringing it all together.

If you could spill some beans on your other projects that are going to be out soon…

Beans can be spilled as and when rollouts happen (laughs)

The same format for Made in Heaven Season 2 is being followed as we did for the first season. We are following the same format of Made in Heaven. There are a couple of surprises too. Then I am doing a series called ‘Dahaad’ with Sonakshi Sinha. It is a crime drama set in Rajasthan.

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