Revisiting India’s history isn’t just about watching events unfold — it’s about pausing, cross-checking references, and asking if every detail holds up. That’s exactly how we watched Freedom At Midnight. For showrunner-director Nikkhil Advani, adapting Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s celebrated book Freedom At Midnight was no easy task — it demanded sensitivity, balance, and an uncompromising commitment to historical accuracy. Yet, it was also a journey he relished. In conversation with mid-day, Advani speaks about why the entire 14-episode series was shot in one go, the pressure of portraying real-life figures on screen, and why the scene following Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination remains his favourite. Excerpts from the interview.

The response to the first season, I think was good. It was a tough show to make. Given that so many people had read the book [Freedom At Midnight], and it’s a favourite topic for so many, [people thought] we’d screw it up. To be able to overcome that and balance so many points of view was [not easy]. It’s a huge ensemble piece, the responsibility of getting it right is much higher than on a fiction show. The reviews were heartening. We got so many calls and tweets [saying] ‘they balanced it’ — be it in the pragmatism, [Pandit Jawaharlal] Nehru’s ideology when he torn between Gandhi’s stance and [politics of it]. I think we got a lot of things right and got some stuff wrong.

Anything that we felt that needed to be backed up [with facts], or when there was a different point of view on an incident or fact, we [referred] to our strong research team. The writing room basically followed three things. One, that every scene is to follow the logline. Then SonyLIV’s head Danish Khan said while we are watching a lesson in history, there should be a level of drama, that constant ticking clock, which is also there in the background music and you feel it when a bomb is going to blow up, or something is going to happen. The third big thing was the moment somebody in the writing room read [a fact] differently, we backed it up with outside sources and annotations.

As a filmmaker, you’re always dealing with polarized opinions. It’s just because of social media today that possibly it’s easier for me to understand what somebody very far away is thinking about what I’ve made. People always had dissenting opinions and polarized opinions, but we followed the book as our source material. It was a chaotic and confusing time, and nobody predicted it would blow up 

the way it did.

For me, patriotism is a very personal. Whether it is Akshay Kumar trying to airlift over 170,000 Indians, or a film about a man discovering that the motherland is everything through a story of migration, even Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway [2023] is extremely patriotic. The subject is very interesting. As for Freedom At Midnight, I think that Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny speech is such a big moment in all our lives. If I’ve made people feel proud of being an Indian at the end of the seven episodes, then I’ve done my patriotic duty.

That’s the big advantage of the platform. Their whole thing was cast for the character and don’t bother about stars. So, whether it’s Chirag, Rajendra Chawla, or Sidhant, they are all incredible theatre actors. Most of them have worked with top directors who I hold in high regard. They were all good actors.

It did not surprise me, but one of my favourite performances Anurag Thakur who plays Madanlal Pawar. He will be the standout performance of season two. I think Anurag Thakur is a name that most cinephiles and lovers of great good storytelling and good cinema are going to be talking about for the next 15-20 years. There’s also a scene after the assassination that is my favourite. I remember when Chirag was made to lie down on the funeral pyre, the room had about 80 people, but there was pin drop silence. People felt they were in the same room as Gandhi’s body. I got goosebumps. The way Sardar and Nehru brokedown was too good. I never imagined the scene to come out so beautifully.

Nikkhil Advani shot ‘Freedom At Midnight’ Seasons 1 and 2 together. He says, “For ‘Rocket Boys’ also we shot both seasons together. When you make a period show of this scale, genre, and pilot, you have to make it together because it just makes production sense. It took a year to write the 14 episodes, and they were written together.”