Firsts are special. Director Vivek Daschaudary makes his debut with Toaster, a quirky-comedy, starring Rajkummar Rao and Sanya Malhotra, about a miser whose unhealthy obsession with retrieving an electrical appliance leads to mishaps and murders. For Vivek, who has worked on ad films before and was also an assistant director on another Rajkummar-led project Guns & Gulaabs (2023), making his first feature in itself was a big milestone. “That’s the end goal every struggling filmmaker is striving for,” he says with a laugh. “I was working on other projects before this but nothing materialised. When Raj and Patralekhaa (actor, producer and Rajkummar’s wife) approached me with the script, I found it really interesting. It was tough to pass on it.”
Vivek goes long back with both Rajkummar and Patralekhaa. He says he knew the latter since the time she first moved to Mumbai to be an actor. “I was an AD at the time. I met Patralekhaa through common friends. Then, ultimately, I met Raj. We all have seen each other’s journey up close over the years. So, I was glad that they approached me for their first production.” Toaster marks the debut of Rajkummar and Patralekhaa’s home production Kampa Films.
We ask Vivek if it is easier to direct friends. “Oh, definitely,” he says. “We can be honest with each other. Also, you know their taste, you know what they will like or not. It makes things so much easier for a debut director. With an actor you don’t know or a star, you don’t know how much feedback you can give.”
With Toaster, Vivek also had the advantage of an impressive ensemble. Apart from Rajkummar and Sanya, the cast list has other solid performers like Abhishek Banerjee, Upendra Limaye and Archana Puran Singh. “They are such seasoned and polished actors, I didn’t even have to tell them what kind of acting I wanted,” says Vivek. “I had seen Raj’s work in the past, like the Stree series, and I needed his comic timing for the film but who was actually a revelation was Sanya (Malhotra). She grabbed the character so well and her humour was so straight-faced and yet so on-point.”
Comedy can be a tough nut to crack. Humour is subjective — what one finds funny, the other might not. “It’s a tough genre. You can’t please everybody,” says Vivek. “But I also think a good joke is infectious. It always starts with you finding something funny and then if it also gets a community laugh, then you know it is working.” He gives an example of a scene in the film where Rajkummar’s character is sneaking out of a house in a burkha after stealing his beloved toaster when he is caught by a marijuana-influenced Abhishek Banerjee who thinks he might be experiencing a hallucination. “We performed it so many times and even at the edit table we were not sure if it was working. But when it came out, it actually became the highlight of the film," says Vivek. "See, as writers and directors we have a funny scene on paper, then we perform it and then we finally see it in the edit room. For us, the humour can thin out. But when the audience gives it approval, that’s when you know it is working.”
Since Toaster was a direct-to-digital release, it loses out on the immediate, community applaud and approval you can get in a theatre. “Who doesn’t like a big screen experience” says Vivek. “But the call for taking the film directly to Netflix rested with Raj and Patralekhaa. Also, on OTT you can really push the envelope. There are some stories which can’t be told on the big screen and here digital comes to the rescue.” He also explained that when you can pause and play a film on OTT it is both an advantage and a disadvantage. “Your first 20 minutes have to be cracking, otherwise the viewer might shift to something else. In the theatre once the audience is seated, you have their attention for two hours,” he says. “But then to get an audience to the theatre is again something. Your trailer has to be interesting first. Then, if a family is going to come all the way, pay the parking ticket and sit for your film, they are bound to ask who they are watching. Then the stars come in. It’s all a system. But you will always have a 12th Fail or a Laapataa Ladies which break it and work on both theatres and OTT.”