Filmmaker Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari on working in tandem with her director-husband on her next, the comedy-drama Bareilly Ki Barfi, and not taking their collective success seriously
Sanyukta Iyer (MUMBAI MIRROR; July 25, 2017)

Nil Battey Sannata director Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari had finished shooting her debut film and was flying back to Mumbai from Delhi when the self-diagnosed Tsundoku — the Japanese word for a person who buys books even though they may never read them — purchased five books at the airport. "I couldn't sleep on the flight and started on a French book, The Ingredients Of Love. One line stuck in my head. Returning home, I told Nitesh that there was something really nice about that sentence and even though he thought I was crazy to want to jump from one film to another so quickly, we began to spin a story around it," Ashwiny reminisces.

For the next 12 months, her husband, Nitesh Tiwari, the director of the wrestling-drama Dangal, went on to write for her a script with Shreyas Jain, which she loved. After giving her the title, Nil Battey Sannata for the earlier film, he once again delivered a cracker, Bareilly Ki Barfi, and Ashwiny knew instantly that she wanted to shoot this romcom in the small town of Uttar Pradesh.

Produced by Junglee Pictures, the slice-of-life comedy-drama has Ayushmann Khurrana, Rajkummar Rao and Kriti Sanon as leads. While the versatile Rajkummar balances the mild-mannered salesman at a sari shop-turned-streetsmart lover boy and Ayushmann is a perfect fit as the Romeo, Kriti could appear a tad westernised to play Bitti, a starry-eyed, small-town girl? Ashwiny doesn't agree. "As storytellers, we need to break the dichotomy of perceptions towards actors. All through his career, Pankaj Tripathi has only been seen as a gangster, politician or cop. I broke the mould in Nil Battey Sannata by putting him in the shoes of a school principal and it worked. He returns in Bareilly as a quirky father. Ditto, Kriti. Just because she is tall and beautiful in western wear, we have typecast her in modern-day commercial roles. That's not right."

She goes on to reveal that contrary to perceptions, Kriti is one of the simplest people in real life. "Her father's a chartered accountant and her mother is a physics professor. She comes from a modest upbringing and brings that on the table," she adds.

Ashwiny drew extensively from her personal journey as an ad filmmaker for the film. A Mumbai girl, her work took her to Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Orissa, among other places. When she moved to writing for TV, she understood that the saas-bahu audience set the box-office registers ringing too. "I am a small-town woman at heart. I've shared food with neighbours and grown up with open doors. It still exists in real India. Unfortunately, in the chaos of the city, we've lost out on personal interactions," she sighs.

The challenge, she admits, was to ensure that the dialogue wasn't over-the-top or vulgar while translating it from the script to the big screen. "There's a line at the end of the trailer — 'Sandaas se leke Sushila tak sab dikh raha hai' — which has been well-received but could've fallen flat," she reasons.

Ashwiny laughs when referred to as one-half of Bollywood's leading director couple after she bagged the Filmfare Best Debut Director award on the same stage as Nitesh, who picked up the Best Director award for Dangal. "Nitesh and I have worked together for years and have seen it all through a beautiful corporate job. Filmmaking for us is just a by-product of advertising with a lot more glamour. We understand that some years will see acclaim and awards, which could be followed by a year of no films and no trophies. Nitesh and I just work for a good night's sleep," she smiles, adding that she comes from the arts while Nitesh is the quintessential writer. "We have lots of conversations and there are no judgements. We discuss extensively during prep, but once a film goes on floors we do not interfere. No opinions are ever imposed."

At the end of the day, she adds, Nitesh and she are just parents doing a full-time job to take care of their seven-year-old-twins and treat them to family vacations. "My daughter recently surprised me by writing 'director' in an essay on 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' I asked her what she thought a 'director' did and she said they are hardworking artistes, just like her mother. That's my life!" she signs off with a laugh.