A lot has happened in Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s life between her last directorial venture, Faadu (2022), and now. The filmmaker faced halts on developing projects, and personal loss with her mother passing on. So, when 2025 began, she wanted to do what she knows best — tell stories. The director has been busy scripting the biopic of Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy, and his wife Sudha Murty, an educator and author. 

The project was announced in 2021, but Tiwari says it will take some time before she takes it on floors. “I’m still writing. I do hope it happens, because we have been writing, and it is a complicated story to tell. I’m in touch with the family; I discuss the script with their son [Rohan Murty]. But it will take its own sweet time,” she shares. 

Not too long ago, the director was also set to bring Devika Rani, Indian cinema’s first female star, and her filmmaker-husband Himanshu Rai’s love story to screen. Probe her on the movie, and she says, “That is on hold right now. The studio has changed. That is the past.”

The grammar of Hindi cinema has changed in the post-pandemic market. A change for the worse, many believe. Tiwari, a prominent voice of the middle-of-the-road cinema with beautiful films in Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017) and Panga (2020), is displeased with the industry’s obsession with box-office numbers. So much so that she took a step back in the interim.

She rues, “Did anyone ask me how much Nil Battey Sannata [2016] made at the box office? We never discussed that. Javed ji [Akhtar] once told me no one remembers the box-office numbers of the movies that people talk about. That’s because we looked at cinema as good cinema; it was a director and writer’s medium. That’s why we had amazing stories. In Tamil cinema, it’s there even today. But [in Hindi cinema], earning Rs. 100 crore became the benchmark of a good director.” 

Today, box-office numbers and franchises are being pursued instead of original stories. She reveals, “I have been told so many times to make Bareilly Ki Barfi’s sequel. But then, you’re making a film just so that you can tick some [boxes]. It’s difficult to convince me to do that,” says Tiwari, who is currently shooting for a web film.