After watching the first rough-cut of Sriram Raghavanâs AndhaDhun, the suits at Viacom18, the studio that bankrolled the film, werenât quite impressed. They were apprehensive about the filmâs deliberately cryptic ending and voiced their concerns to Raghavan, declaring that the âaudience wonât get itâ.
Raghavan, whoâs known to churn out clever, edge-of-the-seat thrillers, was baffled at the scepticism as AndhaDhunâs entire narrative depended on the unrelenting ambiguity.
Another thing that bolstered Viacomâs argument was a focus group screening it organised where a group of young girls said they âhatedâ the second-half, while the boys responded positively. However, Raghavan wasnât willing to give up on his vision on the feedback of a few people.
âThe girls saw it first and they hated the second half. I was like, âitâs okay, this can happenâ. I told Viacom that I get the fact that they found it confusing but we cannot depend on their response too much,â said Raghavan in an interview with HuffPost India.
The problem with the Viacom-organised focus group was also that at that point, the film was still unfinished and the background score, a key component in the movie, was yet to be incorporated in several scenes.
The Ek Hasina Thi director pushed back on the studioâs suggestion of making the film more âaccessibleâ and one that had a âdefinitiveâ ending.
He asserted himself, saying, âThis is the film I want to make. And this is the version (the current one) that goes. Ye hi jaayega.â
While Raghavan doesnât know for sure, he has a feeling that the studio kept the filmâs promotions low-key because they werenât convinced about it.
âThey werenât sold on the idea. They probably believed the audience arenât going to get it.â
AndhaDhunâs successâthe film has been on many best-of-the-year lists and has had a remarkable commercial runâillustrates that even as Bollywood is beginning to look beyond stars and conventional plots, there can still be a gap between an independent filmmakerâs radical vision and what studio bosses assume the audience wants or will understand.
âłIf I had given in and changed the movieâs end, it would become different altogether. Now if they want to remake it in the south, Iâm fine if they change it to their way but I was sure I wonât change mine,â he said.
But resistance from the studio wasnât the only challenge AndhaDhun faced.
When Raghavan and his frequent collaborator, Pooja Ladha Surti, began approaching actors for the main roles, they hadnât yet figured out the ending. âAll we knew was that weâll keep it open and ambiguous,â he said.
That became a problem.
A few A-list actors Raghavan spoke to werenât convinced and said ânoâ to the project. âThey were really polite when they said no,â Raghavan laughed, without naming names. âThen I thought Iâll just make the film with a newcomer who can spend time learning piano. Out of nowhere, Ayushmann Khurrana texted me. He himself had figured out that I am making a film and reached out to say heâs in. That was it. It helped that he was a musician. Tabu was already on board. All of us would sit and jam on the writing and things quickly fell in place.â
Raghavan finished the shoot in 44 days, though he detailed to Mint Lounge earlier this year that these 44 days were spread through an entire year as his cast and crew got busy with other projects.
Once the actors were on board, Raghavan needed to stitch together the plot and make sense of it. After days of deliberation, he remembered a short story of a blind hare, which a friend had narrated.
Said Raghavan, âSomewhere in old Britain, there was a famous hunter who didnât get any good hunt one day. On his way home, he finally found a hare who he thought he could hunt but even the tiny hare gave him a long chase before getting shot. When the hunter went to collect the spoils, he realises the hare was blind, which makes him feel horrible. He feels this hare survived the jungle being blind, how can I be proud of this kill?â
Raghavan said that he took an idea from this story and reimagined it in the world of AndhaDhun as something that could bind the filmâs narrative together.
âI told my colleagues that we can start with this rabbit getting hunted and end with the rabbit on Ayushmannâs cane, but they said it was too subtle. And I was like, âlook, nobody, including Viacom, believes itâs going to be commercial success. Our budgets are also low so letâs just go ahead and experiment maybe?ââ
The experiment paid off handsomely as the filmâs ending still remains a hotly debated subject of discussions among cinephiles whoâve dedicated threads on Twitter and Quora deconstructing the hare motif. One theory went that the hare is partially blind, so effectively, Khurranaâs character has also regained his eyesight, but partially.
Raghavan, however, counters this.
âThere is a confusion there and I donât mind it but honestly, the hare was fully blind. I told the VFX guys to show both his (the hareâs) eyes scratched out. Then the guy who did it told me it would look fake and we should instead show one diseased eye because many rabbits go blind in the course of their lives because they have sensitive eyes,â Raghavan said.
The director is currently writing a war drama for which the cast is still undecided.
Looking back, Raghavan said that a film that taught him the most was the Saif Ali Khan-Kareena Kapoor starrer, Agent Vinod. âłThere were a few choices I made which were very corrupt. Saif wanted it to be a Bond-like movie. I told him with the money we have, we canât do it and itâll show. Still we tried. The issue with the film was that we shot and shot, we were shooting till January 2012 (the film released in March), so I didnât even have time to see and fix the loopholes. The lesson I learnt was that I will never compromise on the time I need for the edit.â
The universe that he createsâwhether itâs Ek Hasina Thi, Johnny Gaddar, Badlapur or AndhaDhun is decidedly dark. Does he ever aspire to make a happy movie? âI make dark films so to speak because they donât get made here that much. Having said that, my aim is to reach the same number of people that, say, a Bajrangi Bhaijaan did. My themes might be adult but hey, I promise you a good time. Itâs a restricted audience but itâs warming up.â
For instance, Raghavan points out that AndhaDhun was more enthusiastically received than Badlapur. âThere are people who hate Badlapur and mistake the misogyny of the characters as the misogyny of the film. What some donât get is that by the end of the film you had to start hating Varunâs character and empathising with Nawaz. That is the design of the story.â
The filmmaker says that he watched Badlapur in a theatre and couldnât contain his excitement on seeing people laugh, gasp and enjoy the thriller.
âThe audiences were responding to it and enjoying it and as a director, you want that again and again, you know. So you engineer your next film to be like that. Which takes you away from what made you likeable in the first place.â
So how does he deal with this contradiction?
âI think you just have to go back to being a student again,â says Raghavan.