Huma Qureshi: I'm not an accessory to a hero's journey

Bikas: I started working on this film in 2017. I have been pitching it since 2018. Then, of course, COVID happened. We make a lot of films in India, but the film that you want to make usually takes a bit of time. I don't hold it against the process of filmmaking. Something that you want to make should not be that easy. So, I cherish that struggle. I don't hold anything against it.

It was a struggle at multiple levels, creatively, to be able to write something. The learning from Chauranga was also to reach out to wider audiences. I come from a very small town in Jharkhand and Chauranga never released there, even though the film was in the specific dialect of the region. My family had to take a bus to travel 100 kilometers to the nearest cinema to watch that film.

I wanted to make a film that reaches out, that releases in my hometown. It’s great that it's going to TIFF, but I think it'll be a bigger reward for me if it releases in my hometown.

Shiladitya: Bikas narrated the film to me back in 2017. We were very excited but it felt way beyond our bandwidth. It felt too big a film. We all come from this independent world, and we felt that a big producer, and some big studio will produce it in the best possible way. He was signed by some production house also, and, in the meantime, the script went to various labs. But somehow the film wasn’t happening. One fine day in 2022, I got a call from Bikas to know if I was interested in Bayaan.

B: There’s another twist in the tale. Shila was going to Tokyo for a shoot but he got so excited that he quickly he set up a meeting with an investor. We met and it was kind of sealed. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple, more hiccups followed. Many backed out.

S: That investor also backed out, nothing happened, nothing materialized. After that, for one and a half years, every day, we'd pitch it to someone and get rejected. Meanwhile, I was also putting together some corpus. Then, a big studio offered us a big sum but they also came up with a list of changes. We were also so tired that we thought of making the changes to at least get the film made. But next morning we realised it won’t be the film we’d have wanted to make. It was a very hard decision at that time, to say no to a very lucrative offer, when we had nothing in hand. We decided to make that film which we wanted to make. We did all the math again to figure how we’d pull it off independently and we restarted.

B: It actually took off when Huma came on board. I sent a simple text to Huma. She had shown interest when I had told a one-liner about the film to her in LA. I quickly sent her a pitch deck. She said she’d like to read the script and asked if any studio or platform was attached. We told her not, for maintaining the sanctity of the story. She said, no problem, send me the script.

S: The thing I like about Huma is that she takes her own decisions otherwise in our industry people are surrounded by so many advising them. Not only is she a great actor, but very enterprising also.

Huma: I first met Bikas in 2019 in LA through a common friend, Jasmine Jaisinghani. So clearly Bikas must have made a big impression that I remembered him after all these years. The moment he messaged me, I instantly connected. Of course, I knew Shila, he's quite a stalwart in the indie circuit. When I met both of them, they were just so eager and passionate about making this movie. I hadn't done an independent film in a very long time. I can't remember the last film that I had done without a studio backing, or without an OTT backing. But I thought the script was fantastic. I thought it was a very, very special script. I thought the vision that they had for it was very, very unique. I knew there not too many safety nets but they were just crazy about making this film, and I was like, what is the worst that’ll happen. May be we’ll make a bad film and nobody will see it. But I feel that when your cup is full, and you're doing many different things, you want to take that one creative chance on something that you feel could be very special.

I was just like this is a lovely story, and they're trying to do something different, and let me just go along for the ride and see where this lands us. I think movies get made because of the people behind them. I know actors are often the face of it and get all the love but I feel it's always a collective effort. It takes a village to mount something, and a lot of, blood, sweat, tears, hard work, all of that, and it was a difficult film to make. There were many many many challenges each and every day.

H: I think we all ought to come together in some way or the other, and just make it happen, whatever it takes. I know this happens in the West a lot, where actors sometimes decide to do certain projects, because lending their name or their support to them will just make them happen. And I know in India we don't really have that tradition because actors doing commercial cinema feel it'll take away their stardom, or commercial directors or producers will not come to them. But I also feel that today we are living in such an interesting time where good content is so genre agnostic. I feel very thrilled that in the same month that I am at TIFF with Bayaan I have a Jolly LLB releasing, I have a Maharani releasing the month after, I have my own home production, so I feel like I'm so blessed in a way that I'm getting to dabble and work with such an interesting bunch of people. All very different, but all hare one thing in common, that they just love cinema, and they want to tell good stories.

B: It was triggered by a real-world case. I got fascinated by it. I got totally consumed by it. I started researching about it. The most disturbing thing was that women were out on the street protesting against a court verdict, against conviction of a rapist. It didn't make sense at all. Why would that happen in today's time, when there is so much of awareness about feminism, there are so many women in positions of power in our society in general.

H: For me what was very exciting was to play Roohi with a lot of vulnerability as well as strength. I think very few scripts offer the platform, the space to allow for that kind of nuanced performance, where you are trying to be like, okay, she's a cop, and this is what she does, but it is not some kind of a caricature-ish filmy cop. There is a lot of layering to it, there's a lot that she's also fighting in her personal life, that she's dealing with, the systemic patriarchy that she's trying to fight.

S: Our target was how in the West there are films which do well in the festivals, critically also, but, at the same time, they do very well in the box office as well. For example, No Country for Old Men or any of the Scorsese films. We want to do that kind of cinema which is very audience-friendly but, at the same time, talks about something important.

H: I feel that sweet silver spot exists. I feel it's not an either-or, that you can either make something for critical acclaim, or do the festival route, or you can do for the box office There are many films from India as well, that have managed to balance that out.

B: We had a google meet and I felt he was our Baba.

S: He may not have many scenes but his presence is throughout the film.

H: I think we were very, very aware that we wanted to show the situation, the conflict, the problem at the heart of it, but not really make it, like, a victim or a sob story, or indulge in a lot of poverty porn. It’s very easy to make something controversial, or headline-y, but I think, as people, we are far more empathetic that the idea is to make an engaging film. If somebody watches and it leads to changed behaviour, and so be it. But the idea is not to offend anyone, the idea is not to rake up anything, and I think we all have been very clear about that from the get-go.

B: The idea was not to make a film about one bad apple, or one region, or one such figure, because that would have been unjust to the larger thematic world of the film. I was more interested in creating a portrait of a society where such men can exist. What kind of social, political, economic milieu forced survivors to stay silent. Because one of the startling things for me in initial research was that many of these women, they came back, and they told their parents, and they chose not to believe them, rather than the corrupt men. They would choose to ignore their own daughters. I was more interested in this rather thematically fertile world I was trying to make.

H: I think it's part of a larger narrative. I try and pick characters which are very strong women. I'm fascinated to play living, breathing, three-dimensional women. I'm not interested in playing caricature-ish women. I'm not an accessory to a hero's journey. I feel today we've reached a place in our evolution as cinema people, as a society, where we want to see more. And also as an artist, I want to do more. And today, finally, we're at a place where makers, producers are telling stories, where there's a lot more for the women to do. They're living, breathing, real people with flaws and follies. They could be good, bad, evil, ugly, doesn't matter. They could be confused, they could be lost, they could be finding themselves, but the idea is to create, hopefully a filmography, which has all these different facets.