Between Truth and Drama: When filmmakers tread the line while telling real stories
The director's dilemma: Sensitivity over sensationalism
Filmmaker
Nagesh Kukunoor
, who has never hesitated from experimenting with his work, recently dipped his toes in the genre of true crime drama. With his latest release - 'The Hunt: The
Rajiv Gandhi Assassination
' he has presented a seven-episode long investigative drama based on the murder of an ex-Prime Minister. Highlighting how he managed to strike a balance between creative liberty and authenticity of the story, Nagesh Kukunoor, in an exclusive conversation with us, shared, "A lot of the people of my generation remember it (the assassination) very clearly.
So, you want to handle it with the utmost sensitivity and not sensationalize things.
"
"For me, what is exciting about the project is it never taps into any of the political connections. What it deals with is a pure police procedural, a crime thriller, if you will. And that's what got me excited about the project in the first place. And it's a book, 90 Days, literally, once we chose to adapt it, it plays out like a thriller. And even though people are familiar with it, I guarantee that when you actually see the jaw's going to be on the floor at several points, saying, Oh my God, did that really happen?"
The art of dramatization: Writing what wasn't said
Shedding light on how drama brings the real on reel, the director added, "Now where we have to take creative liberty is, let's say, I'm giving a random example.
Let's say a couple of people met, a decision was taken, and then an event happened. This is what would have been reported by the journalists during that period. Now, if we choose to dramatize that, I'm going to have to write a scene. I'm going to have the characters say certain things.
And then I'm going to have it actually play out."
"Now, I wasn't there, so how would I know exactly what words were said, right? But in writing the dialogues, and I had two co-writers with me, we made sure that we handled it with as much sensitivity as possible to make sure that we were true to the characters of the people we were portraying.
So I would like to think that we did a solid job. We didn't point fingers. We just let the events play out as they did. We handled both sides with equal sensitivity.
"
The Hunt - The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case Trailer: Amit Sial, Sahil Vaid, Bagavathi Perumal, Danish Iqbal and Girish Sharma Starrer The Hunt - The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case Official Trailer
Another noted film personality who weighed in on the subject is
Anupam Kher
. He has been a part of several movies that are based on real events. We got in touch with him when his 'IB71'was about to hit the big screens.
Inspired by true events, 'IB 71' is an espionage thriller set against the backdrop of the Indo-Pak war of 1971.
It follows the story of an Intelligence Bureau (IB) officer, who uncovers a sinister plot by Pakistan and China to launch a joint attack on India within ten days.
Speaking on the delicate tightrope between truth and cinematic storytelling, Anupam Kher, in context to 'IB71' specifically mentioned, "As far as the incident is concerned, there is not much cinematic liberty taken. But of course, because jab incident hua tha toh background score nahi chalta hai.
Yeh film mein background score hai. And thodi-thodi cinematic liberty is taken with any, even when you make biopics.
You do make it because it's an experience you want to give to the audience. It's a ten-day film that has to come in about two hours of cinema. But the feel of the film, the incidents of the film, what actually happened, how we sort of conned ISI, and how our agents went there, stayed in a hotel, etc. That is absolutely true."
Anupam Kher Interview: IB71, His EXPERIENCE Of 1971 WAR, Vidyut Jammwal & More
The grey zone: where liberty becomes a risk
There is a limit, however, to how filmmakers can stretch the truth. In legal biopics or political thrillers, dramatization can lead to controversy, defamation cases, or political backlash. Even well-researched films.
That's where filmmaker Nagesh's earlier quote becomes relevant - "We handled both sides with equal sensitivity."
Audience decoding fact from fiction
With the rise of true-crime documentaries and biographical cinema, audiences now bear a responsibility too. The line between truth and creative liberty often blurs unless viewers make the effort to research what was real and what was invented for screen impact.
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Indian Express
a day ago
- Indian Express
Nagesh Kukunoor at Idea Exchange: ‘The climate has lent itself to many lawsuits, making it more terrifying for filmmakers'
Filmmaker Nagesh Kukunoor on his recent series The Hunt- The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case, keeping it apolitical and why we haven't cracked the true underdog sports story. The sesion was moderated by Alaka Sahani, Associate Editor, The Indian Express. Alaka Sahani: You have managed to keep your new web series — The Hunt- The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case — quite apolitical, given that it follows the investigation after former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was killed in a gruesome manner. How did you decide on its tone and treatment? I've always been clear about avoiding politics and religion. It's one of those areas where you're absolutely going to upset someone. It really doesn't matter how objective you try to be. What excited me about The Hunt was the investigation. I was around when the assassination happened and understood snatches of it. However, reading Anirudhya Mitra's book (Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi's Assassins) and realising what had really happened in those 90 days were two completely different things. When I read it, my mind was blown. The hunt itself was so interesting for me that I kind of saw the path forward, to not touch upon any political angles. It starts with a political assassination and people assume that the rest of it is a political show, but it's mainly the assassination. After the show came out, I just kept my fingers crossed for the first two weeks. We're not out of the woods yet but hoping that everything will go smoothly. Alaka Sahani: You had your primary source material in the form of a book. But what kind of research and filtering process went into it? I co-wrote it with two other writers, and when you have a book that you base everything on — and this is also for legal purposes — you do whatever the requisite research is. You read the articles, some of the SIT members themselves have written books. There are multiple and differing viewpoints. So it became apparent after gathering all the material that we wanted to pick one and run with it. And that was the book. However, what's interesting, and this was also the reason that attracted me to the project, was that I have never adapted a book before. The most amazing sequences that play out on screen will sometimes be a single line in the book. To pick the events that actually tell the story, to make it cohesive, because when you undertake the largest manhunt in history, it's not as simple as what's shown in the show. People are telling me, 'oh, it's such a thriller'. That's because we made it like that. In reality, no investigation ever plays out like that. Sandeep Singh: Were you looking for a theme for a series or did you decide on it after you read the book? Anirudhya Mitra brought the material to Sameer Nair, who heads Applause Entertainment (production company). Sameer asked him to write a book so that we can adapt it. Once the book was written, that's when he pitched it to me. It was a series from the get-go. For the past seven years, I've just been almost entirely in the series space. Gone are the days when you would look at something and say, 'Oh God! This is so dense, how do I condense it in two hours?' And now that this stress is out of the window, the only question is monetary viability. Way before streaming came to India, I'd been trying to pitch myself as a series director in the US. I've been an HBO fan and long format was something I was just waiting for. Feature films are awesome, but up to this point, it has been gratifying to do stuff in the long format. Mohamed Thaver: Towards the end of the series, there are certain things which are not directly said, perhaps hinting at something. Does the book also leave things open-ended or have you made some changes? We have made a couple of changes because there are so many theories floating around. So, one had to kind of maybe suggest and kind of leave it open-ended. So, that's what we did. In the case of a true crime, the moment you take it from the page to a dramatic format, the kind of liberties you have to take… So every small thing, including the words that come out of the character's mouth, makes me think: are we doing right by them? It arguably was the most stressful thing. And I don't mean for being sued or creating a controversy. It's me as a writer and a filmmaker; I want to do right by whoever I'm portraying. In my world, there is seldom any black and white, it is all grey. Even when I deal with the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), it's dealt with so much humanity. There's never any finger pointing because as one of the characters says: 'One man's terrorist is another man's hero. Mihir Vasavda: Be it the LTTE side, the political side or the security establishment — how do you make a series without hurting any one of them? I don't know what that answer is but when we were writing it, more than anything else, we were absolutely paying attention to the fact that there would not be any misrepresentation. Taking liberties can be interpreted as misrepresentation. But it's trying to just do the best that you can. Since it's been out, that's been my only stress. It was arguably the most exciting project I've done. But just constantly hoping that you haven't upset anyone… You can say the most meaningful of things in ways that don't offend people, as opposed to doing it in a way that's in your face and getting your point across. And it's genuinely the way I view the world. It doesn't take effort for me to write lines a certain way. Mihir Vasavda: Is it tougher to make these kind of shows or movies now compared to 15 years ago? It is a hypersensitive world and people can come at you from any angle. When I made Hyderabad Blues (1998), the censor board gave me 91 cuts. It was one of the most torturous processes to get the film to the theatre. So, I'm not new to this kind of milieu. There the gatekeepers were defined. So I knew that when I was going up before the censor board, such and such thing would happen. The Anand Patwardhans of the world were also on a parallel track with me. He was doing his own stuff and I would constantly look and say: 'Man, I could never do that'. I still write within this space and this is how I do it. In today's times, everything is so amped up. So yes, you really don't know what's going to happen and how. The biggest threat to our existence is social media. In 2019, I just disconnected everything and went off the radar. Alaka Sahani: What was in your mind while shooting the Rajiv Gandhi assassination scene? How did you want to portray him? I wanted to show him the way we've seen him in rallies, but arguably that was the most disturbing part of the shoot because you knew that you're portraying a horrific, grizzly scene. So, I tried to handle it with the maximum sensitivity because the whole thing is told from the child's point of view and we don't see anything. And we see very little of the aftermath other than the shoe. I think that was the one scene when you're actually doing the nitty gritties. But at the back of my mind, that was weighing a little bit saying that this is how he went. Alok Deshpande: Could you elaborate on casting for The Hunt. Also, how has OTT changed the casting game? What we understand as casting has changed because of the OTT space. Prior to that, if I had to justify a cast like this to a platform and talk about what the marketability would be and who brings poster value — it would have been virtually impossible. But now, when I clearly sort of lay out my plan, no one baulks. Here, the guiding force was clearly the fact that we had to get people who at least looked like the characters they were portraying. Casting Bay handled this show. They dug around and absolutely found them. Zeeshan Shaikh: Based on the research you did, what is your analysis of the actual assassination? For an organisation that was so secretive, LTTE really went out of its way — they clicked those pictures which showed their involvement in the assassination. They didn't take credit. But the justification was that everything that they did, they documented as proof to show that they could pull off the most audacious things. For example, when they ran a trial run with VP Singh, they had a bunch of different people recording but they followed the same format. Dhanu had a garland and went all the way to VP Singh and garlanded him, which is what's shown there. They wanted to take it back to Prabhakaran and prove to him that they could get all the way to the top. It was brilliant in its conception. They did the same thing here (Gandhi's assassination). Physics played a small part in it otherwise they would have gotten away with the perfect crime. The photographer wanted a slightly better angle and he raises the camera and that's a little bit above the blast radius and the camera survives. Zeeshan Shaikh: At a time, when there are so many filmmakers and artists complaining about their freedom of expression being repressed, did you feel the pinch of what has been happening around you while making The Hunt? If I were to go to my previous shows and tell you the kind of minute changes that one has to make because someone else might be pissed off. Not related to any political space, but a community might take umbrage. So it's everywhere. It's political, it's religious, it's caste-based, everything is no no. You can make a sweet love story set in some small town and I guarantee someone can sue you even there. It's the times we live in. That's the reality of what we do. Alaka Sahani: What kind of vetting did The Hunt undergo? It went through the same that every show does. Every small line, every explanation. The vetting process had been going on for a very long time. It's not something that just happened. Because the climate has lent itself to a lot of lawsuits, it's far more terrifying for filmmakers. Sandeep Singh: We are living in tough times where we have to be careful of what we are seeing and depicting. What do you think has changed? Social media. That is the root of all evil. I don't need to know everyone's opinion, but everyone has an opinion. Let's say you are in an airport and someone recognises you. There are beautiful pluses to that and there are minuses to that. Why would you walk up to a filmmaker and say that the film you made was really bad. What do you hope to achieve with that and what do you think the filmmaker is going to say? You pour your heart and soul into it. The last thing you need is someone walking up to you and saying… it's like, if I walked up to you with your child and say, 'that's one ugly child'. Tell me which parent is going to be like 'you are right, this is a ugly child'. If you have something nice to say to someone who's made a film, say something nice. The last review I read was in 2006. So, I really don't care much for reviews either. With social media, the hate floats to the top and that's what sticks. I have no desire to constantly engage with that. None. Mihir Vasavda: Why haven't we cracked the true sports underdog stories in India? The problem is that in order to reach a larger audience, two things happen. First, you have to get a star. You've destroyed the story there. If you don't worry about the way the person looked and you brought a star, I understand what the filmmakers are doing. Then to justify that star, you need to make it bigger and bigger. Let's say you whittled it down and made it like a three-five crore film. You tell me who is going to see it. Where are you going to show it? Then you have to circle back around to the fact that you have to get at least a B-list star. Our movie universe setup is not equipped to deal with this. That's not going to change. Mohamed Thaver: What prompted you to write and direct to Iqbal? Someone wanted a bunch of us to write short stories to commemorate former President Abdul Kalam's second term in office. I wanted to tell an underdog story. So I had an idea about a deaf and non-speaking kid who excels in malkhamb. I started writing the short story and it was only supposed to be like 10 pages. Seven went in describing what malkhamb was. So then, when I flipped it to cricket, all you had to say was Iqbal wanted to play cricket and you're done. I wrote a short story. A lot of people thought it was a movie about cricket and it wasn't. It never was. The heart and soul was about someone with a disability and overcoming it. This is a classic underdog tale. Alaka Sahani: Is it possible to make more top grossers like Pushpa? If it weren't for the big films, half the industry would not function. The success keeps people employed. There is a certain level of excitement to walk into a theater and watch something on that scale. But that can't be the only thing on offer. With OTT, the world has just become a smaller place. I had written a sci-fi film in 2000 and people kind of laughed. Now I can pitch the same. They might still say, 'we're not going to give you Rs 500 crore to make it' but that is a different conversation. Zeeshan Shaikh: Your film Dor is an official remake of a Malayalam film. What is the creative freedom in recreating art that has already been created by someone? There's not just one way to tell a story, right? I was on a jury and I saw Perumazhakkalam (2004), a Malayalam film. Both this movie and Dor are based on the same original idea about a woman losing her husband. I loved the idea. But TA Razzaq, the story writer and producer, got there first. So I had to go and get the rights from him and then make it. But if you look at Perumazhakkalam and Dor, there is absolutely nothing in common. Not the lensing, not the way the story is told. Sometimes the core idea appeals to you and you say, 'I bet I could tell the story differently'. I did it once again with a movie in 2011 called Mod with Ayesha Takia and Rannvijay Singh. It was based on a Taiwanese film called The Moment in Time that I watched at a festival. Suanshu Khurana: With so many big budget films with big stars not working in recent times in Hindi cinema, how do you see the uncertainty in the film industry? Does it need a fresh perspective? Is that what's happening? There's always a need to put things in a larger context and try and make sense of it. You have some hits, you have some losses. If we look back at the cinema that happened 50 years ago, it was driven by whatever stories were told at that point. So I don't know if just Hindi films aren't working or if now there's a larger scope for other languages to dub and then occupy what is known as the Hindi cinema space. Even when we couldn't raise money for a single film, I had this pig-headed approach that if you try hard enough, someone will give you that money and then eventually the movies would get made. Maybe this is just the lower part of the cycle and again there'll be two or three hits and again it'll come back up again. Zeeshan Shaikh: Did you get a call from DR Karthikeyan (who headed the SIT) after The Hunt was released? He has an alternative version of how things unfold. Sivarasan (the mastermind of the operation) is an important character with an interesting backstory. Is he someone you'd want to flesh out in another version? The answer is no to both. But characters who have a lot to lose are always interesting to write. Given everything, it was great fun writing Sivarasan. Then getting someone like Shafeeq Mustafa for the role. Shafeeq does the first audition and what I remember most is, he takes a drag and holds the cigarette and his hand shakes. I just loved it. That was one of the ways I saw Sivarasan. I wanted that nervous energy. The way Shafeeq walks, that's Sivarasan. I didn't have to structure that walk. Again, these are all the joyous parts of fleshing things out. So no, I would not be interested in doing anything larger.
The Hindu
5 days ago
- The Hindu
Watch: Bollywood Calling again? Nagesh Kukunoor on The Hunt
In this exclusive episode of Inside Man, filmmaker Nagesh Kukunoor opens up about his bold new series The Hunt, based on the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination and the art of staging the greatest anticlimax in Indian political history. He shares what drew him to this explosive material, how he works with actors, and reflects on his evolution from indie gems like Hyderabad Blues to the powerful Teen Deewarein, where he began to balance arthouse with mainstream storytelling. We talk about his relentless pursuit to make a film in every genre — from the hard-hitting Lakshmi on sex trafficking, to the heartwarming Dhanak, his darkest unreleased film Maya, and then adapting to the OTT space with City of Dreams. Despite the shift to digital, Kukunoor remains an independent filmmaker at heart — always mixing it up, always telling stories on his own terms.
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First Post
6 days ago
- First Post
Amit Sial on 'The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case': 'It's an important series for the Gen-Z because...'
In an exclusive interview with Firstpost, the actor spoke about his prep for the show, his character read more It's hard to make political thrillers without taking sides. But what if a filmmaker decides to essay the aftermath of a tragedy that shook the nation? Filmmaker Nagesh Kukunoor and Applause Entertainment's The Hunt is one such show that chronicles what happened after how it happened. Amit Sial, who plays D.R. Kaarthikeyan (IGP CRPF), offers a remarkable and restrained performance. He's fresh off the success of Raid 2. In an exclusive interview with Firstpost, the actor spoke about his prep for the show, his character. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Edited excerpts from the interview How did you prepare for this role? Luckily, there was enough material online, to sort of go through, to get the demeanour, his personality, the way he thinks, the way he talks. All of those things are right. And there's this one specific interview where he's talking about his line of work and the services that he's provided, as an IPS officer and the services he provided while investigating for this particular case. He was a chameleon, so he mostly would converse in English or Tamil. But because you're making a Hindi show, so then to just make it look a little authentic, I had to sort of attach a slight twang to my Hindi because I have a very specific North Indian Hindi, dialect diction. And, so all of these things are just a regular preparation that goes into playing a character, plus the added responsibility of being being very particular about playing a character game because he's a real life person, and it's a real life incident. And then, obviously, I had an amazing help from my director, Nagesh Kukunoor. And the script also was so tight and detail oriented that a lot of help, came from the script itself. What fascinated you about this particular story, and how much were you aware about this entire incident that happened in 1991? The incident itself, just to be a part of this whole story and the lead investigator and, trying to track the case was in itself, a big eye opener and just a privilege to be a part of, something like this. And, yes, I was very much aware of the incident because I was 16 when it actually happened. And when you're 16, you're mature enough to understand these things. Not not so much in detail, though, as, probably I know now. But, over a period of time, I kept reading about, the involvement of entity and trying to understand both sides and all of that. It's a very important series for especially Gen-Z because a lot of them would probably not know about this incident, and, I hope it's an eye opener for them also. What did you take back from participating in a story that is inspired by true events? I don't know what I would take back. I'm just just to be a part of something like this, it sort of fills you up. It sort of it takes you into places within your own self where you probably have never never ventured before. And I think about the unpredictability of life and the kind of consequences politics might have, on one's life. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD
