Sanyukta Iyer (MUMBAI MIRROR; September 16, 2015)

When Production Designers Subrata Chakraborthy and Amit Ray presented their first model of a court to Talvar director Meghna Gulzar, before she rolled with her thriller based on the reallife double-murder of Aarushi Talwar and Hemraj Banjade, she gave it the thumbs down, saying, "Dada, exact banao... real banao." And without any signs of disappointment, the creative duo headed off to Delhi for a recce. "We did not get permission to enter the CBI Court, so we pretended to be students on a research project and walked into the Delhi Court. We even managed to sneak in a few pictures with a hidden camera." Twenty-five days later, when Meghna walked onto the set in Kamalistan Studio, she felt she had walked right into the CBI Court.

They also went on a recce to Ghaziabad to study the Dasna Jail and and recreated it brick by brick in Mumbai. But the biggest challenge during the 60-day pre-production was creating Shruti's room. "It gave us goosebumps," admits Subrata. Aarushi Talwar has metamorphosed into Shruti Tandon in this fictitious narrative.

"We studied graphics of the house published in newspapers for days and even referred to police reports and legal drawings. We had paid special attention to the doors and the design of the house, but when we began constructing our model of the apartment, we couldn't get it right, something was missing," reminisces Amit.

They then visited the real building in Noida and measured the doors from the outside and the distance from the street and ground to ace the dimensions. "We then built a model of the two-bedroom apartment, with an adjacent servant room with a double door. The DOP, Pankaj Kumar, wanted space for movement of his miniature camera model inside our house so we built a bigger model and added lights," says Amit.

Since, they were denied access to the Talwar's Noida house, they studied another apartment in the same building with the same layout. "We measured the distances between the rooms, the walls, ceilings and windows," Subrata recalls.

Two months later, they replicated the house in a Mumbai studio. "But when Irrfan Khan, who plays an investigative officer, walked in, the focus shifted from the set to his performance. He is such a jabardast actor," laughs Subrata.

Like Akira Kurusava's 1950 Japanese film, Rashomon, Talvar presents contradictory accounts of the case, including the parents' version. It was Aarushi's aunt, Vandana Talwar, who launched a campaign to prove the innocence of the Talwars in the murder of their 14-year-old daughter.

Subrata and Amit recall the day Meghna announced 'pack-up' and how heart-wrenching it was to dismantle the entire house and the other smaller sets they had taken weeks to construct. "It reminded us of Haider and Vishal telling us that our work in Kashmir was done. We left our sets in the mountains and headed back to the city with a heavy heart. It was the same feeling all over again," sighs Amit, pointing out Haider released on October 2, exactly a year before Talvar.