Months after the release of Kapoor & Sons in 2016, Shakun Batra started working on a web series that revolved around Osho and his fiery and controversial confidante Ma Anand Sheela.
Having grown up listening to Osho’s teachings [Batra’s father, a businessman, is a follower], the director has been captivated by their lives and how they intersected. But at some point, he realised "Osho might take time." “I already take too much time between films. I love being on set, I do love jumping into the writing world, and I started to feel itchy. I started to feel I needed to do something sooner than later,” he says.
And that is how Gehraiyaan, starring Deepika Padukone, Ananya Panday, Siddhant Chaturvedi, and Dhairya Karwa, came into being.
He describes Gehraiyaan as a ‘complex, modern relationship drama’. “It tries to observe a relationship and see how things can get complicated, and people can get into places where they make complicated choices. And hopefully, we managed to see it without a lens of judgment.” The film grew out of his need to try something that did not "box love into one very clear idea." “I decided to do something which felt more complex and layered, maybe messier, just to shake things up a little for myself as a storyteller.”
Having directed films like Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu [2012] and Kapoor & Sons, Batra knows a thing of two about exploring relationships that go beyond the conventional, and has given us films that offer a fresh outlook within the framework of a genre film. While most would describe the protagonists of these films as dysfunctional or messy, he does not like the adjectives. “I feel the deeper you try and understand any human being, you start to unravel the complexities in them. It's only when you look at things on the surface do things seem very clean and clear. All our lives at different levels tend to get messy as we get older. These are characters that are just going through the motions, and I don't like to look at them as messy.
I think the situations are messy, and people just deal with messy situations. They're not necessarily messy themselves.”
Before he started working on Gehraiyaan, reading Richard Yates’s celebrated book Easter Parade, that told the story of two sisters in New York, and director Noah Baunbach’s Marriage Story inspired him to "chase the idea of authenticity in a relationship." “I started to see that they were trying to observe life for what it is, and there was something there which felt very authentic that I hadn’t felt before.”
When it was time to write, he automatically turned to his friend and writing collaborator Ayesha Devitre. “I’ve always started my ideas with Ayesha. This is a complex story, and Ayesha became a mother a few years ago, so we decided to bring in more interesting people.” That is when Sumit Roy and Yash Sahai stepped in.
The film was meant to go on the floors in mid-March 2020, starting with a schedule in Sri Lanka, just as the pandemic hit and brought the world to a standstill. While the cast continued to prep for their individual characters, Batra used this time to tweak the script to reflect the 'now.; “Time's been my most welcome guest. We used whatever little time we had for getting more objectivity. It helped the script more, it helped the edit more, it helped the music, it helped everything. I think time is your best friend as a creative person, but at some point, you've got to pull the plug.”
So after a six-month enforced break, the crew flew to Goa in order to begin filming. “The decision on Goa was something that happened during the COVID lockdown because we realised it could get quite tricky to go down to Sri Lanka. In hindsight, it was the best thing that happened because I just feel like we got some beautiful stuff in Goa that I don't know we would have gotten in Sri Lanka.”
In the past, Batra has talked about ‘choreographing chaos’ on the sets of his films. And more recently, the Gehraiyaan actors made headlines for joking about the numerous takes the director made them do. But he is not worried about being thought of as a difficult director to work with. “I think it's a bit of a joke, a bit pulling my leg. I do have many takes, I have my own OCD with getting things a certain way. But no, I'm not a perfectionist. I'm not looking for a perfect take. In fact, what I'm looking for is a different take. And sometimes, you're just trying to see all the variations you can get. David Fincher [Fight Club, Se7en, Gone Girl], who's also known for an insane number of takes, once said, ‘You make a movie, you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every day. You bring people down, you put them in a hotel, you have a crew of a hundred people, they all come to set. You don't do that to send them home early.’ So it’s really about how you utilise the time you have on set. A lot of people take time to set up shots over one-two hours. We set up our shots in under 15 minutes, and then use the rest of the time to shoot. That becomes more 'take time.' It's how you distribute your time in a 12-hour day. I distribute it with more takes and less set-ups. It works differently for some other directors.”
Early in the writing process, Batra realised that intimacy between the protagonists is a huge part of Gehraiyaan, and that he would want an intimacy director on board. He reached out to Dar Gai, a Ukrainian director based in India. “I wanted these scenes to look more nuanced and layered, with a little more detailing and thought going into it. I am so proud that we did because it’s also a way of reforming the system. The more I read about how it was being done in the past, the more I felt the need for creating an environment for actors that was safe and secure. You're also more productive that way because you're really giving them a place to explore.”
The film is Batra’s sophomore OTT outing after Searching for Sheela, a documentary on Ma Sheela that dropped on Netflix last summer. The one-hour long film that chronicles Sheela’s return to India after a hiatus of 35 years has not dimmed his fascination at all, and he hopes to return to that web series someday. “I don't think the documentary did justice, in all honesty. It was too little to do after Wild, Wild Country but I think we were still trying to explore another side, which in hindsight, a fictional show can do more justice to. I'm extremely inspired and enthralled by that world, and it is a story I would love to tell.”
Gehraiyaan will premiere on 11 February on Amazon Prime Video India.
Author of Parveen Babi: A Life, Karishma Upadhyay has been writing about movies and movie stars for almost two decades. On Twitter, she goes by @karishmau.
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