It’s been more than a decade since Abhinay Deo gave us the cult hit, Delhi Belly. Since then, the ad filmmaker has been experimenting with genres as diverse as black comedy (Blackmail) and spy thrillers (Force 2), before he got Karisma Kapoor, Helen, Soni Razdan, Jisshu U Sengupta and Surya Sharma in a casting coup of sorts for Brown, a crime drama set in the underbelly of Kolkata.

In between experiencing his first Norwester on the banks of the Hooghly and shooting in the skinny alleys of the city, Abhinay settled down for a free-wheeling chat with us. Excerpts:

We got on to this project a year and a half back. It is a lovely, intense and interesting idea and we decided to put together the story line, get the actors on board and start filming and see where it goes. This story does not have a beginning, middle and end — but it’s a fantastically written character study about broken people in a broken system with all their nuances. It talks about how people are not black and white as generally portrayed in our cinema. It’s a very interesting milieu for me to explore, and that’s where Kolkata comes in as a character in the film.

As a filmmaker, I hate to run with clichés. Our story is about the underbelly of the city and its different layers — not so much the part which the aam janta knows. In the 10 days that we have been shooting there, we have not shot a single monument or tourist spot in the city. That’s how we intend to keep it. We are trying to capture the different textures of Kolkata — from the rich and big Marwari families to the smallest boatman — and the unhurried pace at which everything moves.

Mare Of Easttown is a great example, but we are also about those dark, intense and jovial vignettes of the Anglo Indians, Biharis, Marwaris, bhodrolok Bengalis — communities that actually bring their cultures into the city and carry the city with them at the same time. The whodunit part is a thread that binds these people together and gives us an opportunity to talk about where they come from, how broken and ‘baggaged’ they are.

I think the new platforms have finally given us an opportunity to tell stories that are not bound by the star system. Imagine trying to do a character study 10 years back! Who would buy that? It is high time we went beyond the 20 people we can count on our fingertips, who you had to approach if you wanted anything to see the light of day. If things did not work out, you tried to get together some people from NSD and show your film on 10 screens.

We had great filmmakers such as Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen and Satyajit Ray, making documentaries and features with intense character studies. But their work got branded as parallel cinema instead. Imagine what would have happened if they had access to the new mediums and platforms that we do today!

These lines are blurred, the star system is being dismantled. While we have not come to terms with it yet, the process has started. You simply cannot take a big actor and make it work. People have access to so much that they would rather watch something else than any mediocre stuff that comes their way.

I think for many of these ’90s actors, initially there’s a sense of shock because of the change that is happening. After that comes the requirement of involvement, which is intense and immense. Earlier films were made differently; your story was written on the sets. Now it is about adapting to a very different way of life and delivering to the brief. And hats off to the way they are reinventing themselves. Initially, we were a bit skeptical and so was Karisma. She was facing the camera after a long time after all. But she has been delivering, and how! In fact, she gets more and more surprised about herself every day and we pat ourselves on our back a little harder for having stuck to our gut feeling about casting her in the project.

Helen is 80-plus, comes from a completely different era. We had a tough scene where she was supposed to hold her own in a room with many people. We were wondering how it would pan out. But Helen not only held her own, but was spectacular in the way she made her presence felt. But more than the first day of shoot she had a child-like fascination about the very idea of reading from a script — apparently it was her first time! But how absolutely professional she has been and so hard working. In fact, everyone from Soni Razdan to Jisshu to Surya, the young actors from Bengal and Mumbai — for me, it is fun to be able to bring the experience that the seasoned actors bring with them and combine it with contemporary filmmaking style and try to make something out of it.

Doosra is part fiction-part documentary about Indian cricket and a young girl. I have pushed my creative boundaries in a completely different direction with the film. Unfortunately, many of the festivals, where we wanted to take the film, did not know how to slot it. And then Covid also delayed the process. But it is too poignant and special a story not to be told and I hope the audiences will be able to see it soon.