On a chance sunny afternoon during the Mumbai monsoons, we chat with screenplay and dialogue writer Sumit Arora about everything cinema and life. The writer, in nerdy spectacles and a comfortable, oversized T-shirt, sits attentive on a plush sofa in his Andheri apartment. The conversation begins at the beginning. His childhood and his journey from Meerut, a small town in Uttar Pradesh. Sumit was fairly young when he got on the path of being a writer. “No logic, as such, to leave your hometown and come to Mumbai at 17,” he says with an easy smile.
There were, however, reasons. “The financial situation at home was so dire that I had to look out for ways to improve it,” he says. Sumit had caught on the writing bug at the age of 14 and wanted to do something that was both creative and lucrative. Armed with a proficiency in Hindi and a steady dose of Harishankar Parsai, he started out by writing satirical pieces for regional dailies. “But the pay was less. Those days we used to get 1 rupee per word for freelance articles,” he says. Besides a love for literature, an interest in cinema was budding too. “Lagaan was something that did it for me,” he says. “It made me realise that a film can tell a story and it doesn’t only need to have maar-dhaadh (fighting scenes). I knew it now. I had to go to the movies.”
Expectedly, the family wasn’t convinced. “Growing up, I had heard this story about my father going to Mumbai to become an actor but returning mid-way as his finances got over,” Sumit says with a laugh. “Everybody thought I would undergo the same fate.”
He didn’t. In June 2006, a 17-year-old Sumit landed in Mumbai. His first place of residence was a Rs 200-per day lodge in Bhendi Bazaar, which soon upgraded to a one room-kitchen he shared with nine to 10 other people, all of them from the industry (“They were either creatives or Ads. Birds of a feather…”)
He soon landed some television gigs and wrote for soaps like Chhoona Hai Aasmaan (2007) and Dill Mill Gaye (2007). But the final destination was always cinema. He started downloading film scripts from the internet, wrote some rough drafts (“Somethings that aren’t written to and shouldn’t get made”) and discovered Syd Field. “I was doing everything to learn. In writing, you are the Eklavya and the Dronacharya,” he philosophises. “It’s like cutting the thumb every day and presenting it to yourself.”
After an ignorable comedy-drama All Is Well (2015), Sumit got to pen dialogues for the film that changed the course of his career: Raj & DK’s horror-comedy Stree (2018). “With Stree, my voice as a writer was finally heard by the audiences,” he says. This collaboration with the director duo culminated into writing for The Family Man (2019-21) and Guns & Gulaabs (2023). His voice, however, was awaiting to be roared from the mouth of a superstar. Sumit’s rousing, massy dialogues for Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan elicited hoots in theatres and memes on the internet. He remembers the writing process for the blockbuster as “tricky”. “For every big star, the dialogue has to be such that it goes with the character and also is a comment on the star’s personality,” he says. “But if only the superstar in an actor is speaking through the dialogues, people would rather watch his interviews. It’s a fine balance.”
Most recently, he delivered the screenplay and dialogues for the Kartik Aaryan sports-biopic Chandu Champion. The Hindi spoken in the Kabir Khan directorial has a Marathi twang. Kartik’s character Murlikant pronounces champion as ‘champee-on’. An informative touch. “It’s all because of my interest in slangs and languages,” says Sumit. “I get fascinated by how language in our country changes every few kilometres. Moreover, I had already worked on a script which was set in a Maharashtrian background and had spoken to a lot of people while researching for it so that helped while writing dialogues for Chandu Champion.”
Last year, with two SRK blockbusters (Pathaan and Jawan) and one Ranbir Kapoor rager (Animal), it seemed like Hindi cinema is out of the slump. However, the first six months of 2024 have been dismal, with star-vehicles like Fighter and Bade Miyan Chote Miyan unable to pull audiences to theatres. Most films, feel predictable, tropey. “I think we in the Hindi film industry get too excited with a new concept or an idea. That excitement fizzles out for the audience in the first 15-20 minutes of a film,” he says. “Now they want a change in the set-structure. A new way of telling a familiar tale.” The conversation has also shifted towards how star fees and entourage costs are bleeding the industry, while writers and editors get peanuts. “Sometimes the star’s makeup artist gets paid more than the writer,” he says. “In a post-pandemic world, it has been proven that barring a few stars, it’s content that drives the commerce.”
He goes on to explain how paying writers well can ensure good cinema. “When writers get good money, they can relax and dedicate themselves completely to one project,” he says. “But since that’s not the case, they have to juggle many gigs to make ends meet. Their energies are divided amidst multiple projects so they are unable to create one thing that can compete at a global level.”
For him, however, doing multiple things at a time minimises the possibility for a creative block. “I like the freedom. When I am unable to crack something in one film or series, I can just jump to another and work on it. It prevents writer’s block,” he says. The screenwriter has a busy schedule ahead. His last work was Chandu Champion, upcoming is the Shahid Kapoor actioner Deva, Varun Dhawan’s massy attempt Baby John, Raj & DK’s desi spy outing Citadel: Honey Bunny and the third season of The Family Man. With so much work, we ask him if there are days when he is completely out of new ideas. “No,” he says. “The only dearth, is of time.”