The demands of the market have never bothered Nagesh Kukunoor. The filmmaker, who gave up a lucrative engineering career to helm his debut film Hyderabad Blues (1998), has always done things his way. It could be his decision to direct Hyderabad Blues 2, one of the first sequels to release in Indian theatres– “Ten people saw it; that’s a different matter,” he jokes –or now, to direct a web series based on a book of true incidents, something he had never attempted earlier. The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case on SonyLIV is an adaptation of Anirudhya Mitra’s book Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi’s Assassins, and according to the two-time National Film Award-winner, reads like a whodunit.
“I do not touch anything political or religious, and this book is neither,” he says, adding that the book plays out like a true crime thriller. “It starts with the assassination of the former Indian Prime Minister and then tells the reader what happens in the next 90 days,” he says. Starring actors such as Amit Sial, Sahil Vaid, Bagavathi Perumal and Girish Sharma, the show has already garnered positive reviews.
Even with the book as a guiding force, Kukunoor, who has directed films such as 3 Deewarein, Iqbal, Dor, Lakshmi and Dhanak, knew he had to rely on his sensitivity as a director to deal with a show such as this. “One of the things that I have always done in my career is that I deal with all my characters with a large dose of humanity. I was doubly careful here, because on the one hand, you had the special investigation team, and many of them are alive today. On the other hand, there is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE–who had carried out the suicide bombing). I wanted to ensure that when the camera is on either of them, I deal with them with the utmost humanity,” he says.
Even with all this awareness, Kukunoor admits that in today’s day and age, nothing is safe from controversy. “You can make a sweet romantic comedy in a lovely picturesque town in India and still have it blown into a controversy,” he says.
Kukunoor shares that he was one of the first Indian directors to jump onto the web-series bandwagon, with City of Dreams in 2019. He also directed three episodes of Modern Love Hyderabad and was the showrunner for the anthology series as well. “Whether you do a film or a web series, there are two big constraints, time and money. That aside, the challenge with a web series is that it is equal to doing five feature films. I like to believe that when I write and direct a web show, I give it the same level of love and dedication as I would to a film, even if the budget or time is less,” he says. Seven years hence, Kukunoor believes he is now a veteran in this space. “It is a format I enjoy immensely, even though it places all kinds of insane constraints on me,” he adds.
Apart from some dark days, when one can’t get their project funded or is unable to release a film, Kukunoor finds a lot of joy in filmmaking. “The most amazing thing about this profession is that the highs are incredibly high and the lows are incredibly low. As long as you learn to deal with these ridiculous insulin spikes and sugar lows, you will manage just fine,” says the director who is actively working on another web series and hopes to lens a film by the end of the year.