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Hindustan Times
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Smita Singh: 'Unlike Hollywood, screenwriting here has always been director-led'
What was your childhood like? Screenwriter Smita Singh (Courtesy the subject) My father is from Madhya Pradesh, and my mother has roots in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. My father was in the army, so I have been all over during my childhood. Growing up in the 1980s with an army background meant visiting militarized zones and travelling with people who were carrying AK-47s and guns all the time. Punjab and Kashmir are where I spent most of my childhood. As a child, I did a lot of reading and watched a lot of movies. Why and when did you think of becoming a writer? Growing up in an army unit meant that my sister and I did not go out and interact with other people much. Everyone is from a different age group and different backgrounds. Some don't have their families along. So, it was a pretty solitary childhood which created a lot of time and space for reading. Also, being articulate, being able to express myself in words, became a priority for me. I thought of getting into FTII, but it was too much – I didn't know how to do it. So, I finished my graduation from MP, which was my father's last posting, and then took up a Mass Communications course in Delhi, which I did not even finish. I did marketing jobs, back-end hotel jobs, sales – for a while, I was lost in Delhi. Then I got this job of transcribing interviews for Doordarshan, where I spent long hours going through interviews. Then I worked with Midi Tech, where we used to work on documentaries for National Geographic and Discovery. At this time, I was working in non-fiction, but I found that there were scripts online. I spent hours reading thousands of scripts, and that's when I thought this was something I wanted to do. I wanted to write for films. Then, much later in life, in 2012, I went to FTII. How did Mumbai happen? In 2006, I got married and moved to Bangalore. It was difficult to work there because I didn't know the language. So, from 2009 to 2012, I stopped working, and all I did was watch films. I turned my house into a mini film library. I would watch even the very obscure films from all over the world. I watched films and read a lot of scripts. In 2012, I felt ready to go to FTII, and I enrolled there. It was at FTII, where I developed the script for what eventually became Raat Akeli Hai. So, Tulsea, a talent management firm, came there for Campus Recruitment. Chaitanya (Hegde), who heads Tulsea, read the script and really liked it, and told me that Tulsea would like to represent me. That, for me, was a big step because I thought, now I know somebody who can introduce me to the industry. And they did it wonderfully. When I came to Bombay in 2014, Tulsea introduced me to lovely people like Shakun (Batra) and Kannu Behl. I also did a writing gig for Kannu. He discusses a lot, we talk a lot, sometimes the stories don't go anywhere, but I had a lovely time working with him. Then I also developed something with Gattu (Abhishek Kapoor). But then, about a year in, I felt that I didn't have the patience for it. I feel that I can't be someone's typist, you know. I can't be sitting there, writing down what someone is thinking. And I am pretty sure that people who worked with me realized that as well. But the writing gigs I did in my first year in Bombay did not really work out, and I got bored. Around that time, Vikram Motwayne read Raat Akeli Hai. He gave it to Anurag (Kashyap), who called to meet me. At that time, he was editing Bombay Velvet. He really liked the script and told me that he wanted to make it, but then again, a year went past like that, and nothing happened. Then my script got selected for Mumbai Mantra, and I had to pitch it to 70 producers, which was part of the deal of the Mumbai Mantra thing. That's where Honey Trehan read the script and liked it. So, I sold the script to Honey and Abhishek (Chuabey), who run Macguffin Pictures together. Now, around the same time, Vikram (Motwayne) was getting into Sacred Games, and since they had read my script, they thought that both Sacred Games and my film share the cop universe in some way, and called me to come on board. So, I was interviewed by someone at Netflix and got the job to work on Sacred Games. A scene from Sacred Games (Ishika Mohan Motwane/Netflix) Sacred Games was your first release. Tell me what it was working on the first Netflix Original of India. Initially, I thought I was only hired because I was a woman, and they just wanted to satisfy their DEI (Diversity, Equality, Inclusion) policy. And I was very conscious of that. Sudip (Sharma) was there for a little while before he moved on to work on Patal Lok because he could handle only one of those projects. Then there was Vasant Nath in the Writer's Room along with me, and Varun (Grover) was the lead writer on it. Now, funnily enough, at FTII, what they do is, they stop the course for some time and get a person who teaches you to write for TV. Vinod Ranganathan was that person in our course. So, he came, and he was telling us about Netflix and digital and all that. He told us we should break our stories into 100 episodes, and we were like, 'What is he talking about?' We just wanted to get on with our film scripts and make films. So, initially, we wrote him off. But suddenly, I was very into what he was saying. He taught us how to break down a story into 100 episodes, what milestoning is and all of that. It was one of the most intense exercises, probably the most writing I ever did. I picked up Girls Hostel or Ladies Hostel – which eventually became Khauf – to write as a drama, not as horror. Now, when I started working on Sacred Games, and when I read Vikram Chandra's book, my FTII learning appeared to me, and I thought, 'This is how you do it'. So, I was a trained writer, but that was not an asset. Because the others came from a different way of writing. We don't have a tradition of learning to write in this country. We don't have a studio system like in Hollywood where writers are churning out episode after episode week after week. In fact, a lot of Hollywood movies are adaptations of novels or plays. They have a hundred-year-old tradition of screenwriting. But here, it has always been mostly director-led. The director would get some people and tell them to write something, then many times, the director himself would get into writing. Then, for dialogues, they would hire someone else. For me, coming from FTII, it was quite different. I was a little impatient with reinventing the wheel. Writers here have not sat in a Writer's Room, they have never done it in a structured way. I'd say, it wasn't that pleasant for me. In terms of our social and political concerns, Varun and I were on the same page. But it was the nuts and bolts where it was difficult for me. A lot of the writing process was push and pull. For the other two writers, it was also a bit difficult that they were getting notes from an entity (Netflix) other than the director. For me, it wasn't new because getting notes from the BBC or National Geographic was normal in my earlier work. But in terms of excitement, the project was great for me. We broke down episodic beats together, worked on the structure. So, I thought, anything was possible after Sacred Games. Did the credit on Sacred Games help you make what you wanted to?Sacred Games helped me get Midnight's Children. The project never happened, but we wrote it. It was with Vishal (Bharadwaj) ji. There was him, Minty Tejpal, Sabrina Dhawan and I in the Writers' Room. It was a great room. That project did not happen, but during that time, Vishalji read my script of Raat Akeli Hai and introduced me to Aparna (Purohit) at Amazon. So, she came on board, and then Honey (Trehan) and Abhishek (Chuabey) at Macguffin became Executive Line Producers. Honey has a great sense of drama, and he understood my script immediately. The script was already written, though I had been tinkering with it, and the film was then produced by RSVP. 'I picked up Girls Hostel or Ladies Hostel – which eventually became Khauf– to write as a drama, not as horror.' (Courtesy Prime Video) Till recently, a writer would never be able to lead anything in cinema. But now, with the role of the 'Creator' on shows, they can. How was your experience creating Khauf and transitioning from a writer to a writer-creator? I think, before I could do it with Khauf, Sudip (Sharma) was the only one who was a pure writer turned into a creator. Now, with me, there were concerns that there was no Writers' Room. People found it difficult to believe that I could write it all by myself. And I was very clear that I wanted to write alone. I had experienced Writers' Rooms previously, and I definitely did not want to walk that path. For me, way more important than the money or the credit for the show was writing alone. I really wanted to be left alone as a writer. Of course, there is a time when I'd open doors and invite opinions and feedback. In fact, I hired as a creative consultant, one of the most critical minds I knew from FTII, Professor Ashwini Mallick. I trusted him to be very objective about this. He helped me with the initial assessment along with one person at Amazon. We started off in 2020, then Covid hit, my parents were in the ICU and all of that. I asked Amazon if they wanted to get a big director, a big name to lead the project after I was done writing it, but then I realized, why would a big director come and work if I am the creator? So, I thought of leading the show myself. That tells me you believe in the auteur theory. Do you? Well, I do. But it's important to know where that belief is coming from. If I am seeing a woman, sitting by the window, biting into an apple, it's important to know where the image is coming from. If a director tells me this image, and I am writing according to his mind, he is the author, or auteur, of that, and I have just written that. But if every single image forming a narrative is coming from my mind, then I author that story. It's like asking if I believe that the author is the auteur of his novel. He always is, isn't he? Yes, I understand that cinema is more expansive and diverse as a medium. And a lot of the fights between writers and directors originate in this. It's the battle of authorship. How do you define success as a screenwriter? When you work with any material, there is a lot of thinking, a lot of struggle in the process of understanding it and finding your way with it. But there is a moment when you find the answers. Let's say you are struggling with a character arc, and then suddenly you think that this character has to kill someone, and only then will his arc be complete – that is the moment when you win. And nobody can take it away from you. When you have tortured yourself enough, for 16-20 hours a day sometimes, and then when you narrate it to someone, and their jaw drops, that, I think, is success as a screenwriter. Which films and filmmakers have influenced you the most? I didn't even know who Fincher was, and then I once got a DVD and watched Zodiac. Since then, I have watched that film at least twice every year. I can quote every dialogue. It has scenes that are insane, they are art. The film breaks the barrier between the audience and itself. I feel I am part of its scenes. Then Polanski, of course. I don't know why I loved Polanski's and Woody Allen's films so much. I know there is something odd about that. But even before I knew about their lives, I have enjoyed their work. I have seen Woody Allen's work innumerable times. I have seen every Woody Allen film. Same with Polanski's work. I have seen each of his films. I quite like John Carpenter's work as well.
Scroll.in
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Creepy corridors, eerie interiors, fear at every turn: How ‘Khauf' creates dread
The show is titled Khauf, meaning dread – and dread it delivers in spades. In the recently released Prime Video series, four women claim that their hostel in Delhi is haunted by a malevolent spirit. When Madhu (Monika Panwar) enters the hostel, it is unclear whether the women are projecting their anxieties onto her or something is actually lurking in the corridors and the back alley. Herself a victim of violence, Madhu starts behaving in a manner that suggests demonic possession. A hoarse-voiced hakim (Rajat Kapoor) with a collection of poisonous potions gets involved, contributing an extra layer of creepiness. Created by Smita Singh (Sacred Games, Raat Akeli Hai), Khauf uses the horror genre to explore the pervasive violence faced by women. The eight-episode series vividly harnesses lighting, lensing and production design (by Nitin Zihani Choudhary) to bring out Singh's concerns. No space is free of fear or relief, with Delhi itself taking on the air of an open-air prison. The Matchbox Shots production is co-directed by Pankaj Kumar, the brilliant cinematographer of Haider, Tumbbad and Guns & Gulaabs, and advertising filmmaker Surya Balakrishnan. The directors spoke to Scroll about finding the right visual schema to match Smita Singh's vision of women trapped in and perverted by a toxic society. Here are edited excerpts from the interview. What are the reactions you been getting to Khauf? Pankaj Kumar: The show is quite intense. Also, it's in the niche genre of horror. Considering all of that, I'm very happy with the response. I was expecting women to respond positively, but men have too. Surya Balakrishnan: A lot of people have said that the show has made them angry. I don't know if success is the right word – it's sad that we need to make this show. How did each of you get involved with the series? Pankaj Kumar: Smita Singh approached me directly. I shot the film Raat Akeli Hai, which she wrote. I knew the power of her writing. Once I started reading her script, I couldn't stop. Even though I was in the middle of a shoot, I read all eight episodes in one go because they were so engaging. Surya Balakrishnan: I came in much later, by which time Pankaj and Smita had done a lot of the work. Smita and I are both part of Tulsea, the talent management agency. What interested me was how Delhi is and can be to women through horror as a genre. While the script used horror as a foundation, it said so much more. Khauf has a distinctive design: long corridors, constricted spaces, lots of horizontal and vertical lines. Surya Balakrishnan: There were many different spaces like the hostel, the forest, the cop station. The way Pankaj has shot and visualised the show, every camera movement has creepiness and eeriness no matter which space you are in. Pankaj Kumar: The strength of the script is that the horror element is just the veneer. While the script has powerfully written characters, it also integrates the spaces very well into the narrative. The irony of the hostel is that it is supposed to be a safe place for women, where they can be free from the fear of male violence. Then there is the everyday experience of taking public transport, being harassed in public spaces. I explored the hostel in Delhi on which Smita had based her script. The hostel had a back alley that was quite terrifying for the women at that hostel. We shot in the actual back alley. We constructed a set of the hakim's haveli in a way that it feels claustrophobic. Anybody who enters that space feels completely trapped. It has iron bars that enclose the open corridors on all sides. It's a maze-like structure. Play Delhi has been filmed in an uncanny way. There is a strange emptiness, the feeling of being cut off from normalcy. Pankaj Kumar: We used a subjective and limited point of view, in which the entire experience narrows down to one person. We did not open up the city from other perspectives. The camera does not show the space in a neutral way. I wanted viewers to go into the minds of the characters and experience the city like they are experiencing it. We should be able to feel the fears, the tremors, rather than being told about them. By narrowing the perspective, we were able to create an immersive quality. Surya Balakrishnan: The way the city has been treated makes it universal. It's not just a story of Delhi or a hostel in Delhi. It feels like it can happen anywhere. What conversations did you have about the lighting pattern? Numerous scenes are dunked in darkness. Then there is the terrifying hostel corridor. Pankaj Kumar: There is external darkness and then internal darkness. The lighting is a manifestation of the psychology of the characters. The strong lines, lighting effects and texture are important because I wanted real spaces. Many government-run hostels are rundown, because of which there is a kind of moisture on the walls. That becomes quite spooky – you start seeing figures in the textures of the walls. They start speaking back to you. The lure of the corridor is that it provides perspective. It's like an open space that is closing in. You are subconsciously terrified of being sucked into the space. It acts like a vacuum. Just walking in the eerie silence of the corridor is spooky because it creates its own echoes. What kind of lenses did you use? Pankaj Kumar: I didn't limit myself to a specific set of lenses. There are sequences where I have used either wide-angle or long lenses for close-ups. For example, when Madhu is narrating her ordeal to Shohini [the therapist played by Shilpa Shukla], the camera is very close to Madhu's face. It's a telephoto lens. In this scene, I want the camera to be observational. I don't want the image to be unnecessarily disturbing because Madhu's story itself is disturbing. All I can do is to observe her in silence and in extreme closeness. When Madhu enters the hostel room for the first time and the first knock she hears, the camera creeps in close onto her face. That produces a disturbing effect. I don't just want to observe her. I want to get into her world. The one thing Khauf largely lacks is obvious jump scares. Pankaj Kumar: There were initially more jump scares in the script. We also shot a few more jump scares than you see in the final show. But as we went along, we realised that we didn't need the jump scares. They would have served as distractions since we were already capturing the real horror – which is what the women face in everyday life. We thought, let the genre be there on the surface, let's stick to the core strength of the idea. We didn't need to spook audiences any further. We kept chipping away and kept only a couple of jump scares. I personally don't like cliched horror tropes. What I loved about Tumbbad was that it didn't have typical horror elements. in Khauf too, it's not about jump scares or a ghost story. The horror is metaphorical. Both Smita and I admire Roman Polanski. The poisoning is kind of a tribute to Rosemary's Baby. Also Stanley Kubrick. Contemporary filmmakers like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers are doing great work in horror. Surya Balakrishnan: There is a ghost, but then there is also a lot more horror outside of the ghost. That's scarier than an entity. Whose power is it? Is it Madhu's or the entity's? That kind of slight confusion as to where it's coming from makes it even scarier. Play What was the casting process like? Surya Balakrishnan: By the time I came on board, the casting was done. Pankaj Kumar: All the actors except for Rajat Kapoor were selected through auditions. When we saw Monika's audition, there was a unanimous yes. She performed a complex scene in which she transforms from one person into another. Smita was keen on getting Shalini Vatsa to play the warden. The other women went through rigorous workshops to develop chemistry among themselves. Both Smita and I wanted Rajat Kapoor for the hakim. There is a certain gravitas in Rajat's voice, he has immense talent. The hakim has a hoarse voice that is textured by the poison. Rajat brought a bass quality to his voice. Just watching him perform was creepy. I started exploring the images in ways that would enhance the hakim's personality. The first time we introduce the hakim, the camera is creeping up from behind him to a close-up. It was a great introduction for Rajat because of the intense way he was performing and interacting with the character sitting in front of him. Khauf has been criticised for being over-layered to the point of repetition and exhaustion. There is little relief from the violence or the horrors. Could the series have been tighter or even shorter? Pankaj Kumar: Initially, the show was longer. There were a few more back stories, and the motivations for actions were explored further. One draft had Hakim's back story, which was quite intriguing. Each episode was turning out to be longer than an hour. We curtailed the script and cut it down further in the editing. Perhaps we would have cut the show down even more, after some introspection. Surya Balakrishnan: As an afterthought, having watched the show as an audience member rather than a part of the crew, there were parts when I felt, do I have to watch this again, I got it.
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Nanni Moretti in Stable Condition After Suffering Heart Attack in Rome
Italian auteur Nanni Moretti suffered a heart attack on Wednesday and is reportedly in intensive care in stable condition, according to Italian news reports. The 71-year-old idiosyncratic director, actor and screenwriter, who won the 2001 Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for 'The Son's Room,' was rushed in the afternoon to Rome's San Camillo hospital where he underwent surgery. Italian news agency Ansa reported that he was in stable condition. More from Variety Taraji P. Henson to Host AmfAR Cannes Gala, Duran Duran to Perform (EXCLUSIVE) Cannes Prizewinner Anasuya Sengupta, BAFTA Breakthrough Actor Sindhu Sreenivasa Murthy Lead Tulsea's New Talent Roster (EXCLUSIVE) 'In Retreat' Producer Tackles Gulf Wife Syndrome in Film Bazaar Drama Project 'Kurinji' Moretti previously suffered a mild heart attack in October last year. Known as an acerbic moralist and social commentator, Moretti most recently competed in Cannes in 2023 with high-concept meta-comedy 'A Brighter Tomorrow,' in which he stars as a Roman director who is shooting a period piece set in Rome in 1956. Before being hospitalized he was in pre-production on a new film, details of which are not known. Moretti has often constructed his films around his own persona, appearing as the central character, starting with his 1976 Super-8 debut 'Io Sono un'Autarchico' and its follow-up, 'Ecce Bombo,' which humorously captured the discontent gripping Italy in the bleak 1970s, and, of course, the autobiografical 'Caro Diario,' 1994, which marked his international breakthrough. Subsequent standout works comprise scathing 2006 Silvio Berlusconi satire 'The Caiman' and 'We Have a Pope' in which he depicted a Pontiff's crisis of faith. Moretti last month attended a retrospective of his work at the Bari International Film & TV Festival in southern Italy. He was celebrated in 2024 with a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for the restaured version of 'Ecce Bombo' which screened in the Venice Classics section. Best of Variety All the Godzilla Movies Ranked Final Oscar Predictions: International Feature – United Kingdom to Win Its First Statuette With 'The Zone of Interest' 'Game of Thrones' Filming Locations in Northern Ireland to Open as Tourist Attractions
