Vijesh Rajan: Gangs of Wasseypur was my first time on a film set, so it'll always be special to me. I was a VFX assistant and also shot the behind-the-scenes footage. Anurag Kashyap was already an idol of mine, and suddenly I was this fly-on-the-wall observing him working.

What stayed with me was how much directing has to do with people. You have all these departments bringing their own ideas and skills, and the director has to get them working towards the same film. I learnt the value of being clear about what you want from a scene while leaving room for someone else to surprise you. You have to prepare, but you also have to recognise when something unplanned makes the scene better. That's what I take from Guillermo del Toro's phrase, "orchestrating the accident."

Yashoda Parthasarthy: If there's one thing I learnt, was that great filmmaking doesn't come from following a formula. It comes from discovering your own voice and finding the right people to bring it alive.

Vijesh: Yes, that was always the intention. We're both film school graduates, and we taught ourselves animation and VFX. Over the past decade, we've written, directed and produced title sequences, promos and music videos. So, writing and directing were already part of our lives, across different forms.

Even when we were asked to create an animated sequence in someone else's film, we wanted to develop our own idea and work out how to tell it. That meant understanding the filmmaker's world while bringing something of our own to it. A title sequence might only last a few minutes, but you're still making choices about story, mood, rhythm and what the audience takes away. Aakhri Ride gave us the chance to bring that experience to a story of our own.

Yashoda: Aakhri Ride may be my first narrative film, but storytelling and direction have always been at the heart of what I do. One of my earliest filmmaking workshops was with Adam Elliot, the filmmaker behind Mary and Max. He spoke about exploring different mediums, and I remember being equally fascinated by the use of glycerin to create raindrops on a window in stop-motion animation as I was by light painting in live action filmmaking. That curiosity has stayed with me. Motion design and VFX didn't lead me towards direction. They gave me the tools to become a bolder filmmaker who isn't restricted by the medium.

Vijesh: The idea came from our long cab rides home. We live in Ghatkopar, and after meetings in Andheri or Versova, we would often spend an hour and a half, sometimes two, in a cab.

We would chat with the drivers or hear bits of their phone conversations. Some told us they slept in their cars and sent most of their earnings home. Others spoke about difficult employers or money troubles. I remember one driver desperately trying to arrange money over the phone. We didn't know the whole story, but his worry stayed with me.

That led us to the idea of a man so consumed by his everyday struggles that he fails to notice the horror unfolding right behind him. That collision between an everyday crisis and a horror story felt tragic and absurdly funny at the same time.

Yashoda: Having grown up in Mumbai's chawls and moved homes frequently, financial instability was something I understood very personally. There was always this underlying fear of an angry landlord asking us to leave, an unexpected expense, or suddenly having to arrange money for another deposit. That constant feeling of being on the move stays with you.

What fascinated me about our cab journeys was the invisible social divide within that tiny space. I was grateful for how far I'd come and the freedom to pursue my ambitions, but I could still relate to the driver's struggles. Yet, to him, I was simply the customer sitting comfortably in the back. We're all travelling together, but experiencing entirely different journeys. That contradiction became one of the emotional foundations of Aakhri Ride.

Vijesh: For me, the genres all come from what that night feels like to the protagonist Aman. He needs money, his family is depending on him, and every attempt to sort things out seems to bring another problem. We can laugh at the absurdity of his situation, but for him there's something real at stake. So, while it’s comedy to us, it’s terrifying for him from the start to end. 

That was the balance we wanted. His reactions had to stay believable, however strange the night became. If you care about him, the same moment can be funny and uncomfortable. Horror lets us push that feeling of being overwhelmed even further.

The trans-rights theme is part of that concern with dignity. People deserve respect and the freedom to be themselves, whatever assumptions we might make about them. We wanted the audience to experience those ideas through the characters and their encounters. 

Underneath all that, we were interested in observing how we treat people when we're under pressure ourselves. When you're barely managing your own life, how much room is there to notice someone else's problems? Aman isn't a perfect person, and that makes everything so much more interesting. Yashoda and I wanted the pressure to build so much around Aman, constantly forcing him to make dark choices. And the film is all about the choices he eventually makes. 

Yashoda: I've always believed that every character in a story must have a purpose beyond their identity. Vijesh and I were very particular that if we were writing a trans character, she couldn't simply exist to make a statement about trans rights. She had to be an integral part of the narrative.

What fascinated me was the idea of misfits. We tend to label people as outsiders based on their profession, gender, financial circumstances or simply how different they seem from us. But aren't we all misfits in some way? We're constantly trying to find our place, build our identities and belong somewhere, when perhaps everybody around us is doing exactly the same thing.

Yashoda: I have a rather funny story about this! When my mother first read the script, she immediately said, "You should get that actor from Panchayat. He'd be perfect for Aman!"

And I remember laughing and telling her, "Mom, he's a star now! What do you expect? That he'll just walk into my office one day and say, hey, I heard you're making a short film. Why don't I play the lead?" And strangely enough, that's almost exactly what happened! When I finally told my mother that Chandan was playing Aman, she was absolutely thrilled.

What makes him special is his sincerity and honesty towards his craft. When I first narrated the story to him, he actually teared up because he could relate so deeply to Aman's circumstances and his responsibility towards his family.

Vijesh: Aman carries the film, so we needed someone the audience would stay with even when he was frustrated, frightened or making a bad decision. Chandan has that quality. He’s so innocent and sweet, even as a person. There's a warmth and vulnerability to him that makes your heart melt.

He’s also so expressive! A lot of Aman's world reaches him through phone calls. He's often listening to somebody put another demand on him, and we have to understand what that's doing to him mainly through his reactions. Chandan was so good at making those small shifts register. 

Yashoda: He's also quite mischievous in person, which made working with him a lot of fun. 

Vijesh: Exactly, his comic timing was just as important. The situations are absurd, but Aman's problems are real to him. Chandan plays that desperation sincerely, which is what allows a reaction to be funny and painful at the same time. We needed that consistency as the film kept shifting between humour, tension and horror. His performance gave us someone to believe in through all of it.