Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, collectively known as Raj & DK, who started their journey as filmmakers with the 2003 innovative feature in English, Flavors, are among the most interesting contemporary voices of Indian cinema. It won’t be inapt to say that we are in the era of Raj&DK supremacy. Since the iconic Manoj Bajpayee-starrer The Family Man dropped in 2019 on Amazon Prime Video, the duo has firmly established themselves as the key player in the Indian web series space. If they completed their two decades in the business with two successful web series Farzi and Guns & Gulaabs last year, their upcoming slate looks even more exciting with projects like Citadel: Honey Bunny—the spin-off to the American series by Russo brothers, Citadel for Amazon Prime Video, and Rakt Bramhand-The Bloody Kingdom—web series to be directed by Tumbbad’s Rahi Anil Barve—for Netflix, and of course the much-anticipated third season of The Family Man.
What are the major exciting changes you have seen in Indian cinema in last decade, especially with the rise of OTTs and Indian cinema not only breaking regional boundaries but going international?
Krishna DK: The last few years have seen the rise of South Indian cinema; pan-Indian cinema has become a thing. The good thing about that is—be it in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, or Kannada—the movies that have crossed over have done so essentially staying true to their roots. India is a melting pot of various languages and cultures; when we think of the country, we think it as a whole. This is also the reason why while casting for The Family Man, we decided to cast people from across the industries. We didn’t want to limit it to just the Hindi film industry. Since we have a connect to the Telugu and Tamil industry by virtue of growing up there, we started from there.
Raj Nidimoru: When we started working on The Family Man, we jumped on the idea that we could cast anyone from any part of the country. At that point, nobody was doing it. We picked up actors from the Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam industries and had them speak their language…we didn’t force fit anything or change any dynamics to make it more convenient for the Hindi-speaking audience. The idea was to start bridging the boundaries. More recently, we cast Vijay Sethupathi along with Shahid Kapoor in Farzi. I think this idea, especially from the casting perspective, has found quite a mass acceptance and now we have a lot more instances of industry-agnostic castings.
Also, with OTT the storytelling quality has improved. The feature-film format is quite limiting—it has been so for the past many decades—and you had to sacrifice a lot of things including character building, side plots, nuances, backstories… you had to lean down the thickness of the story and include song and dance, action sequences, and interval points. Since it was driven by Friday box office numbers, a huge chunk of the budget went into promotions ensuring a good opening. We were caught in a format and package-driven filmmaking. With OTT the focus came back on the story. Also, OTTs are not star-driven, but actor-driven, that itself changed a lot of things. I am not saying that a star can’t be a great actor; while a mediocre actor can carry a movie thanks to its packaging, in OTT it is crucial that you be a good actor. Now, with the same audience consuming both kinds of content, there is a want for better quality and nuance. Smaller films are doing better, they are edgier, more nuanced, and reaching new frontiers. And this is because the bigger movies are still somewhere weighed down by the burden of budgets and stars.
In The Family Man, the use of regional languages has helped in the authenticity of the story. But it was not something that was attempted before at such a scale. Were there any apprehensions initially?
DK: We did take a leap of faith—we knew that we were taking a huge risk by starting a brand-new show with a 3-minute opening scene in Malayalam, and not all stakeholders were convinced about our decision. But we wanted to go for authenticity over the simplicity of understanding. In an attempt to not alienate audiences of other regions, we kept those dialogues to the minimum and played more on the situations, emotions, and actions—we made the language kind of irrelevant to what the scene was trying to communicate, but the language adds a texture to the scene. It was a gamble that paid off! The authenticity of the scenes and the characters became one of the main reasons why the show resonated with the audience so well and became this popular. So, when we reached the second season, we took it up a few notches—we had longer and more language-heavy scenes, and now there were smatterings of Srilankan Tamil and Sinhalese as well. The audience by now had gotten a hang of it. But we were careful to not give too much information in a language they don’t know.
Raj: We didn’t think of its success, all we wanted was to break out from the trapping of conventional feature films. It was about our freedom as filmmakers; we wanted to see what we could do with this new medium and the web series format. We didn’t want to encourage thoughts like ‘what if the audience doesn’t accept it’ or ‘what if people don’t understand? And it is not only with the languages spoken by the characters in the series, but we attempted new languages with the camera as well. In fact, right from the music to the shots, to the one-take action sequences—we were pushing the boundaries of the feature-film format in every department possible.
Do you see theatrical releases taking this approach in the near future breaking the language barrier? In a country that has such a low literacy rate, can subtitles become an option for mainstream commercial cinema?
DK: You are absolutely right. It is not easy for theatricals. But on OTT, thankfully now at least we have the option to choose the language of the subtitles—you don’t have to essentially know how to read English or Hindi but can opt for your mother tongue instead. We were aware of this option when we started with The Family Man, but we were still cognizant of the fact that there might be a portion of the audience who would have trouble reading the subtitles. That is why we kept the non-Hindi bits crisp and non-expositional. We didn’t want people to read the film instead of watching it.
Raj: The future is to be authentic and fresh with your storytelling. We should not focus so much on whether people will get the language or not. People are very smart; we don’t need to spoon-feed everything. With the exposure to world cinema, they have seen it all. So, it is even more crucial to give them something fresh instead of derivatives.
While you are focusing on breaking the grammar of feature films, do you find a need for OTT to slowly develop its own grammar as well? If so, what should be some of its basics?
Raj: Yes, there is a grammar; however, we don’t follow that to the T. We shot Guns & Gulaabs in Cinemascope, which is a strict no-no for the web series format as you want your screen to be full and Cinemascope leaves a huge black border on top and at the bottom of the screen. Anamorphic lenses are usually not used when the content is to be viewed on a smaller screen as it is a waste of money. A web series, be it Indian or foreign, follows a particular style: each episode is limited in time, the sequences are limited, the locations are few and there are a lot of smart repeats, etc. But we have as many locations as required; the edits are paced not as per the web-series format but as per the requirement of the story. We are essentially feature filmmakers. We want to imbue our web series with the energy of a feature film. If you are trying to make top-of-the-line shows, you should be pushing the limit of both formats.
DK: The difference between OTT viewing and theatricals is not so much about the screen size as it is about the pace. Watching a series on OTT is like reading a book—you can pick it up anytime, at your ease, and read it at your own pace. While a theatrical is like listening to someone read it out for you at his/her own pace—you can’t pause or repeat. But you can’t take the long-form format for granted—it is a fallacy that since the duration of a web series is more than a feature-length film, you have more time to say things. The OTT audience can get bored in 15 minutes and switch to another show as opposed to the audience in a movie theatre. The shows we make move at a pace similar to a feature film; we use the time to explore more characters, more angles, more plot points, and a lot more happens—a web series is not about taking a feature film and stretching it out three to four times, but to have three or four feature films put together back-to-back. Yes, some shows take their own sweet time and are immersive but in India, unlike in the US where the audience has gotten used to the slow-paced high-end TV show, we have audiences who are used to the pace and excitement of the movie format. But a web series allows you to explore a 360-degree of any subject…that is something you can never do in a feature-length movie.
There was a lot of chatter about how the stars era of Bollywood is kind of over. While your earlier works were with non-stars, what made you go with Shahid Kapoor for Farzi and Varun Dhawan for Citadel… was it their acting prowess or their star value? Does having stars help in the mass market of a show/series?
DK: What is a star? It is essentially someone the audience loves to watch on screen. Irrespective of the format, if you have to choose, you are more likely to pick something that is headlined by a face you love instead of an unknown cast. That way, having a star is always beneficial—be it any format. Having said that, Shahid is a brilliant actor and he was well aware that you need a lot more to hold an audience for 8 hours than in 2 hours of packaged entertainment—you can charm the audience for a few hours, but you have to be the actor who can become the character to keep the audience involved for the entire season and then wait for the next. OTTs are more of a writer’s medium, and it is an actor’s medium—you need compelling characters to keep the audience interested.
Raj: We want to make different kinds of series where a very politically aware The Family Man, a pulpy Guns & Gulaabs, and a mainstreamish Farzi can coexist. Shahid knows his job well and is a mainstream actor, the same goes for Vijay Sethupathi—they both are big-screen actors—and for Farzi I needed that kind of push. When actors like a Shahid Kapoor, or a Varun Dhawan or a Samantha Ruth Prabhu sign up for a project with us, they are not expecting to do something that they have done before—they are open to experimenting with new subjects and even new styles of acting. Varun in Honey Bunny is a new Varun—he is gritty and different—nothing like what and how we know him. It was the same with Samantha in The Family Man 2; it was not what she usually does in movies. The idea is to take these really good actors/stars and make them do something else…and they are open to it.
Citadel: Honey Bunny is a spin-off of the Russo Brothers’ American series. How did such an international collaboration happen?
Raj: We had no clue how to get a collab going. It just came to us. It came through Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios. They had watched and liked The Family Man; it was not a film that went to Cannes or something. It was just a solid series. Both are Amazon properties, so they had access to it. Yes, being part of the Amazon network helped but even if it was a film without any international OTT platform backing it, all you need are people to show your work around.
Do you see Indian cinema expanding its international audience beyond the diaspora?
Raj: It is slightly changing, but it is still driven by the Indian diaspora barring rare few instances. Once we start making high-quality films with fresher concepts and global sensibilities, it will travel. Today, everyone is looking at India in an exciting way; there has been a lot of global interest in India for the last few years. Just as our actors are making it in Hollywood and other European industries, our cinema can definitely do the same.
DK: It helps that we have a large diaspora and if the interest spread from there to the non-Indian audience there is nothing like it. But I am not sure that is actually happening... there has been one film, RRR, which has really broken through. But we need more such instances. It is a major step in the right direction.
One of the main reasons for Iranian cinema’s global appeal was its hyperlocal aspect. But in India, we tend to emulate Hollywood to become international. According to you how much local is too much local?
Raj: It is a fine balance. Each filmmaker for his/her own. The default is to have an international style, but sometimes we become too westernised and start becoming derivatives of those movies and losing our authenticity.
DK: In a nutshell, we need local stories with international sensibilities. You can go as much local as you want with your story…it makes it as much authentic, but when it comes to the storytelling/filmmaking part of it, it needs to have international sense and sensibilities to be accessible to the world audience. Very local stories with local characters told in a style and technique that is world-class, with performances of international standards is the way forward.
