Sanjay Gupta’s romance with crime dramas continues. This time around, though, he has traded Mumbai’s grimy setting for the beaches of Goa. The yet-untitled film, starring Harshvardhan Rane and Meezaan Jafri, revolves around two brothers, who are also football players. After narrating several gangster stories, Gupta is relieved to move towards a modest setting.

“After Mumbai Saga [2021], I felt I was done with set-pieces. I came across this wonderful script, which is about two brothers and football,” says Gupta, who has co-written the drama.

The movie’s setting isn’t the only factor that sets it apart from the filmmaker’s previous offerings. Having collaborated with stars in the past, it was rejuvenating to work with relatively newer faces. “I wanted to first cast the actors with the right physicality and screen presence. I am quite old-fashioned [in my belief] that a hero [must] look like a hero. I felt these two boys have the potential to break through. I cast them because they were football players as well as good actors,” he says of Rane and Jafri.

Currently in post-production, the crime drama is among the five projects conceptualized by Gupta’s production house in 2021, for direct-to-OTT release. “We have no illusion of taking these movies to theatres and making big numbers. I was clear that it would take minimum two years for [Bollywood to recover after the pandemic].”

Besides the upcoming project, Fardeen Khan and Riteish Deshmukh’s Visfot is ready to stream next year. The remaining three are also thrillers set against different backdrops. Gupta adds, “One is a story of a day in Chandni Chowk, while the other is a comedy thriller. I will direct the third, which is a black comedy.”