Ship Of Theseus director Anand Gandhi talks of Emergence, his work-in-progress piece since 2015, which he is eerily seeing play out in reality
Aastha Atray Banan (MID-DAY; July 12, 2020)

Anand Gandhi has been thinking about "a virus" for as long as he has been making movies. A concrete thought made an appearance in The Ship Of Theseus, his 2012 critically acclaimed film, where he questioned the idea of the alien microbes living in our body, and again in Tumbbad, 2018, a film he set in 1918, the year that the Spanish Flu struck India. "The genre of horror, especially zombie stories, have often been used to tell stories of the pandemic. In the US, these movies are backed by the Centre of Disease Control," he reveals.

Gandhi is also an innovator, systems researcher and co-creator of ElseVR, India's first virtual reality (VR) platform. He is also the founder/CEO of the Mumbai-based new media studio and systems think tank Memesys Culture Lab. It's even more reason to discuss viruses and pandemics now given the Coronavirus outbreak that the world is struggling with. Interestingly, since as early as 2015, Gandhi has been working on Emergence, a film surrounding a virus. The story follows four scientists, as they race against time to fight a pandemic that's threatening to destroy the world.

When we probe the genesis of Emergence, Gandhi says it started with him asking the "Who am I, where do I come from and what I am supposed to do?" questions. "It's the stuff children ask, and philosophers don't answer. I looked for answers in spirituality and history. Then, later, as the questions became more comprehensive, I started looking into evolutionary biology and cognitive sciences. All my previous movies have had hints of the question, what is human identity? We are not monolithic entities, we live in a ecosystem. Not just around us, but inside us. Inside us, there are trillions of bacteria that don't share our genome."

"So, we are a colony of organisms. For example, the bacteria in our gut affects our mood—people who have bad gut health tend to suffer from stress and anxiety issues."

This triggered conversations and Gandhi began thinking about a movie about a virus that changes the way humans behave.

When he started writing Emergence, he says he gave it the working title, 2020. Something he now calls prophetic. He began to seek out and have conversations with public healthcare specialists from around the world. "The more I dug, and the more I developed the story [of Emergence], the more I realised that this was an eventuality. When it did happen, my reaction was paranoia. But we have to live with it. Pandemics are like the stars in the night sky. They started their life a long time go, but have begun to reveal themselves now."

The fact that the Coronavirus pandemic caught up with Gandhi is not reason for him to despair. He is working on the movie even now as you read this, adapting it to the current circumstances. It helps that now, he can get straight to the crux of the story, without handholding the audience on the concept. "It functions as a story of caution, but also as one that celebrates resilience. But the quest is the same as before—to answer the question, what is human identity?"

Gandhi believes that although the virus is forcing us to change, many are not going to, since human behaviour is hard wired. "These emotions have been carried over for centuries. So, there will still be those who believe that the earth is flat and that a vaccine is going against the will of God. The virus is pretty new that way," he says, adding that he does think a policy change will come about, though. "It's a punctuation event in our lifetime—so big that people will die. We need to get the death rates down and and get to a vaccine soon. We have to learn how to live with the virus, and know that this [large scale spread] could recur again."

He admits that he is a year too late, but he is also happy that what he spent time studying about and pontificating on, wasn't off the mark. "That's why, it matters."


Still from Tummbad


Still from Ship Of Theseus

Conceived before Coronavirus hit the world, Ship of Theseus director Anand Gandhi tweaks contagion drama Emergence to focus on the post-pandemic world
Uma Ramasubramanian (MID-DAY; May 11, 2020)

Over the past five years, Ship Of Theseus director Anand Gandhi had been writing his next, oblivious that it would turn eerily prophetic. Gandhi's film, titled Emergence, revolves around four scientists who have to find a way to save the population from a pandemic. With the world currently grappling with the Coronavirus, the director has gone back to the drawing board to tweak the story.

"[Earlier] we had planned to give information about the nature of a pandemic [through the film]. Now that we all know what it's like to be in the midst of one, I don't have to educate the audience about its nuances. So, we have had to make some changes in the script," explains the filmmaker.

Since the universe of his story is unfortunately all too familiar to the world at large, Gandhi now intends to take a narrative leap. "I can directly take the audience to the next stage and depict how life could be post-pandemic. That is the new normal we will experience. That was always the crux of my story."

When conceived, the story was set in 2020. The director, who hopes to take it on floors next year, is fast-forwarding the setting of his sci-fi drama to 2025. While he had earlier expressed his wish to cast Irrfan in the film, Gandhi now plans to approach Sushant Singh Rajput. "It's unfortunate that I took so long to write it. I wish Irrfan Khan would have been a part of it. Sushant is a dear friend. So, I always work on the assumption that he will be part of what I create. I have Australian actor Hugo Weaving in mind. I also need four women actors for the principal cast."

Anand Gandhi to kickstart the big-budget project in 2021 with a Hollywood studio; the script revolves around a pandemic
Ankita Chaurasia (MUMBAI MIRROR; May 6, 2020)

Stock scenes of Indians praying in front of the Taj Mahal for redemption in superhero and apocalyptic films, like Independence Day and Armageddon, irked a 15-year-old Anand Gandhi so much that he vowed to change the narrative. For the last five years, the filmmaker has been developing a script that revolves around four frontline women scientists, superheroes in their own way, fighting a contagion. Titled Emergence, it explores the impact of microbiomes on the psyche.

“The idea came while working on Ship Of Theseus that tried to answer whether free will exists. I was intrigued to learn that microbiomes (bacteria in our body) play a significant role in our behaviour,” says Anand, whose next film Tumbbad was about how greed can possess and transform a person, much like a pathogen. “With Emergence, I’m taking the parasite-host relationship further.” He cites a parasitic fungus, Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis, that takes over an ant’s body, controls its mind and turns it into a puppet to perpetuate. Trying to focus more on science than fiction, Anand has roped in epidemiologist Larry Brilliant as Executive Producer, and host-parasite relationship scientist Shelley Adamo as advisor. “Larry spearheaded the team that eradicated smallpox and controlled polio.

Like a detective, he figures out the epicentre of a pandemic and calculates the R-naught of the contagion, which is a measure of how many people it can infect,” Anand says, adding that with Adamo’s advice, he has created a fictional microbe, which is a prion.

The script seems eerily prescient, now that a pandemic has brought the world to a standstill. “I started writing it five years ago, with the working title 2020. My script predicted the rise of right-wing politics, storage crisis for scientific data, paleomicrobe releasing from thawing of the Arctic and behavioral changes brought on by a pandemic. But there was so much research required that by 2017, the office joked that the film would have to be re-titled 2025,” Anand laughs, pointing out that futurists Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, in their 2008 survey, had predicted a 60 per cent chance of over a million dying from a pandemic in this century. “The social implications and subsequent changes in the human species are a part of the narrative.” Has the outbreak changed his life? “I’m too privileged to complain. Besides, my team has been working out of our Goa office since two years.”

Anand is putting out video interviews, the latest one with Irrfan Khan, whom he met soon after Maqbool released. “My short film, Right Here Right Now, came around the same time. We drove to Pune once, and became friends over the years. That video is cathartic,” he says, adding that they had an unspoken pact that Irrfan would be in all his projects. “We explored possibility of his presence in Tumbbad before the final script and schedule changed things. He’d have been in Emergence too. I wish I had created something with him.”

Now, Anand will rework his script slightly as there is no need to define a contagion anymore. He plans to take Emergence on the floors next year. “The idea is not to make the first but the most well-researched film about a pandemic. It will be a big-budget project, we are collaborating with an American studio,” he says. How does he plan to shoot it amid restrictions? “A pandemic is the flipside of global mobility, but it won’t stop air travel. After studying the challenges, every industry will make its own social and physical rule-book to work around the situation, till a vaccine and a cure are found,” he concludes.