Their love for cinema has seen many filmmakers tell stories set in the Indian film industry. Vikramaditya Motwane and co-creator Soumik Sen take a stab at it with Jubilee, Amazon Prime Video’s marquee series that stars Prosenjit Chatterjee, Aditi Rao Hydari, Aparshakti Khurana and Wamiqa Gabbi. Sen surprises us when he says that the period drama has its roots in the Kishore Kumar biopic that he was scripting for Anurag Basu, and was to star Ranbir Kapoor.

“While working on the Kishore Kumar biopic, my research extended to R D Burman, the music of those times and the era before that. In the process, I went through old magazines that gave insight into the functioning of the film industry,” recounts Sen.

It led him, along with Motwane and Atul Sabharwal, to create a fictional tale set in the Hindi film industry of the ’50s and ’60s. Jubilee studies love, power and burning ambitions set against the backdrop of the studio system.

Reminiscing the time actors like Ashok Kumar and Dilip Kumar opted out of studios, Sen shares, “Actors went their independent way when [their star power] became the reason for commerce.”

He adds that the studio system eventually gave way to the star system. “Whenever a new actor is given a break, he likes to associate with a certain production house — like Rajesh Khanna did with Shakti Samanta Productions, or Amitabh Bachchan did with Prakash Mehra.”

While Sen is awaiting the audience’s reaction to the series, we prod him about the fate of the Kumar biopic. “Kishore da’s family would be in the best position to share any details about it,” he says.