After the noir thriller Sacred Games 2, Saif Ali Khan gears up for his next web series with director Ali Abbas Zafar
Sonil Dedhia (MID-DAY; October 10, 2019)

When his peers were big-screen bound, Saif Ali Khan uninhibitedly forayed into the digital space with Sacred Games. A year and two editions of the Netflix original later, the actor is now gearing up for another digital offering — Tandav with director Ali Abbas Zafar.

"It is a show based on politics and is set on a massive scale. I don't want to use American examples, but it's along the lines of House Of Cards, [albeit] set within the framework of Indian politics. The plot takes into account various factions like Dalit politics and UP cops and the whole nexus between them," explains Khan, who will be seen essaying the role of a politician for the first time in his career. "My character is Chanakya-like, in the guise of a youth leader who comes from a privileged background and [aspires to] become the Prime Minister."

Even as he is open to exploring more opportunities on the web, Khan is aware that the latest season of Sacred Games — the show that started it all for him as well as Indian OTT — failed to replicate the success of its opening edition. A common complaint of the viewers was the series' languid pace. "I didn't like the second season as much as the first," the actor admits, displaying his signature candour. "The first season was the most interesting thing I had ever seen on television from any country, especially Kubbra's [Sait] Cuckoo track and how she went on to do frontal nudity. The love story between Ganesh Gaitonde [Nawazuddin Siddiqui's character] and Cuckoo was phenomenal, as was the way sex was treated between them. For me, the way she played the character put the show into a league of its own."

While the first season was designed as a race-against-time thriller with Khan's Sartaj Singh driving the narrative, many felt that the second edition — directed by Anurag Kashyap and Neeraj Ghaywan — took on a more esoteric tone. "Many people said that they loved the first season, but felt that we lost the plot with the [track of] Guruji [Pankaj Tripathi's character]. The open-ended climax didn't go down well with the audience, although I liked it."


(From left) Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in House Of Cards; A still from Sacred Games 2

Hollywood star, Netflix sensation Robin Wright on life with, and after, House Of Cards
Mayank Shekhar (MID-DAY; November 18, 2018)

"Petrified," isn't an emotion you'd instantly associate with Robin Wright, especially given her steely-cold exterior as Claire Underwood (nee Hale) on the Netflix flagship show, House Of Cards (HoC). But that's really how she felt as she called up executive producer, auteur David Fincher, night before a shoot, towards the end of the series.

Why's that? Over the show's six seasons, while Hale had transitioned from being Congressman Frank Underwood's wife, Vice President, First Lady, to the President of the United States; personally, Wright herself, besides earning unprecedented global fame and a Golden Globe for Clare's part, was turning director with HoC's finale episode.

Unknown to most, directing the dark, moody, relatively quiet HoC is a lot like gently tip-toeing around a delicate house of cards itself. For, rules on what you can, and cannot do on the show - no steady-cams, for instance, no hand-held cameras, no tight close-ups, only a specified set of lenses allowed, no use of the (bright) colour red-had been set in stone, by Fincher, when HoC began in 2012, under his direction.

"David is so smart about not conforming to a convention. Would it look like West Wing (a relatively optimistic show; also set in the White House) with lots of movement, pace, activity? He, in fact, created a new portraiture for chaos," Wright says.

Before she stepped into the director's shoes, while still in Claire's high-heels, Fincher told her just one thing: "For every scene, create a (mathematical) fraction (in your head): Behaviour/Time. With everything you look at in the frame, no matter how wide you are; ask yourself: What's the behaviour going on in the room. You can stay in that (pre-determined) wide shot for three solid minutes, if you've got ample 'behaviour' going on. If not, cut out quicker, go somewhere else."

With her last shot for HoC therefore, Wright, 52, didn't just finally move on from Claire, but also moved into filmmaking as a new profession. This is something she appears most keen to talk about, as we meet along with a group of international journalists, on the sidelines of a Netflix slate-event in Singapore.

She starts shooting her maiden feature film as director next winter, the story of which she's uncannily generous enough to share: "It's about a woman who loses her husband and child from a terrorist bombing. Dealing with grief, she goes out into the wilderness, to live in the wilds alone. She feels that she can't re-enter society, or be good for it, being the person she has become. Then she meets an (American) Indian man, who's also suffered tremendous amounts of loss. He teaches her how to live, and love life again."

That's poetic, alright - quite in contrast to psychopathic tendencies of American realpolitik (or politics in general), beneath polite pretentions, that HoC stood for. Rather stood out for: Its uniquely chilling insight into betrayals, lies, deceit that goes on in the White House, or among those desperately wanting to get in. Where, to quote Gore Vidal from the show's fifth season, "Power is an end in itself; and the instinctive urge to prevail, the single most important human trait."

I've used this story before, Wright says, but it's very telling still: "When House of Cards came out, we went to the Democratic National Convention Dinner that year. The actors sat at different tables, with different politicians. Each table was an eclectic group. I was next to a Southern senator. And he went, 'God, I just loved the show. It's so real, so accurate.' So I asked, How accurate? And he said, '99 per cent!' What's the one per cent that's not accurate, I asked. I thought he was going to say, people don't really murder, kill… He said, 'You'll never be able to pass the Education Bill that fast!'"

At this point, of course, one doesn't know whether to laugh, or barf. We laugh. Since it would take at least a year to film the ideas the writers came up with, Wrights recalls, "Sometimes we would shoot a scene, and then that would happen in reality. We would then extract that scene, and reshoot it with another event." The current (Trump) administration though, she exclaims, "Literally stole all our good ideas: Nothing's gonna top that shit!"

The writing process for HoC essentially involved hired advisers in Washington DC to gauge/predict what the repercussion of a particular event/situation on the show could be on Capitol Hill - was it to really happen. This would influence the final scene. Wright adds, "I would then come in, and say, hey, Claire as a character, would only say one of those four lines - she's a man, or woman, of few words. That sort of alteration would help. But that was the easy part." And the hardest part of playing Claire Underwood? "Having to sit up straight, everyday. And I'm not kidding!"

The incessant drama of HoC eventually rubbed off on the show, when in November last year, its lead actor Kevin Spacey (Claire's husband, Frank Underwood) was sacked from the series, following charges of sexual misconduct. Waiting for dust to settle, the show's top management regrouped after Christmas. That they chose to go ahead with HoC, nonetheless, Wright says, were because of two-fold reasons: "One was [to get at] what would be best for the show, its fans, and the five years we put into it. We finished the fifth season with Claire breaking the fourth wall to say, 'This is my turn.' Let's explore that, we thought, as we always intended to.

The other reason was the show's cancellation would've put over a thousand people in the state of Maryland out of employment [that was guaranteed to them for the time]."

Either way, that the final season suffers as a result of Frank being no more, but very much omnipresent in every episode, certainly makes the end of the Underwoods a rather underwhelming experience. It could well be because the graph of the season, at the time of Spacey's exit, must've already been scripted; leaving the writers, producers too little time to start from scratch.

This is still to take away nothing from Wright, as the eerily elegant, President Claire Hale, a life-changing part, she obviously remains grateful for: "To be able to play that fierce character opened doors for me, and why I got Blade Runner 2049, Wonder Woman. I'd been typecast for so many years - being the quiet, pained, understanding wife." I'm thinking her role as Forrest Gump's girlfriend (1994) must have set off that stereotype.

She describes the original intent behind Claire as "being the best of both sexes: a leader in a female body, who is also a man. She simultaneously operates the way a man, and a woman does, within an environment of a very Shakespearean drama." Despite a bit of a hint-hint, wink-wink cliffhanger at the end of HoC, Wright reconfirms Claire - and the series that introduced binge-watching (with all episodes of a season dropping in one go), and redefined television - is definitely not coming back. Having spent over half a decade with Claire, what's she going to miss most? "Her clothes," she says.

Netflix global creative head Ted Sarandos is singularly responsible for perhaps the hugest urban, global addiction/affliction of our times
Mayank Shekhar (MID-DAY; October 28, 2018)

To paraphrase the line from the desi picture Don (1978, 2006), if he wasn't dealing in something altogether legit/legal, 190 mulkon ki (countries') police would anxiously wait to nab Ted Sarandos, 54, by now. For, he's singularly responsible for perhaps the hugest urban, global addiction/affliction of our times. I tell him that as we meet, and he laughs. "Subconsciously influenced" by the daily show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman back in the '70s — the entire weeks' episodes of which he used to watch with his parents on Sunday nights, when they were aired back-to-back on TV — Sarandos essentially came up with a simple but evidently life-altering idea of dropping the full season of a TV show, to be consumed at one go on Netflix, while a countdown almost seduces you to press for the next episode, when the previous one has just finished.

While working on what was then a rental library, Sarandos could also see vast number of customers, who would order in to "watch a few episodes a night [of a TV show], and burn through the [entire] box set!" This didn't surprise him at all. At a practical level however, Sarandos insists, "When we started with House Of Cards, our clear intent was to let the market know that we're not making webisodes, or YouTube videos. We're pushing television to the edges. A crude way of putting that across, would include 60-minute episodes, without commercials — which makes it 15 to 20 minutes longer than an hour on TV. And you don't need recaps of what you saw last week [when the entire season is right there]."

What's the formula to ensure sustained interest levels though? The broad construct is simple: "You have to do something in the first three episodes to get everyone intrigued. Every show has got a slower, or a background episode, or that moment when characters go on vacation, and nothing happens. But the audience is ready for that." What has Netflix effectively done as a result? United people from across the planet in their perseverance, to skip work, weekends, even vacations, going through seasons after seasons of shows on their laptop/phone/TV.

You could erase days from a calendar, as if they never existed. They certainly didn't matter. What did were the goings-on in the lives of folk in Orange Is The New Black, Stranger Things, The Crown, Making A Murderer, Ozark, Mindhunter, Wild Wild Country… The playlist is almost endless. Sarandos is obviously not complaining. The modern word for the cultural phenomenon is binge-ing, or binge-watching: "A reporter for The Wall Street Journal first started writing 'binge' [in reference to Netflix]. We actually tried to get him to stop, because we thought binge was negative, that [connotatively] leads to purge!" The more positive association with Netflix is, of course, the word 'chill' —Netflix and chill — the origins of which Sarandos has no clue about: "It was created by the Internet, and took on a life of its own. We recently did a campaign for Halloween, which was the first time we used it at all. They talk about their love for Netflix in a way that they're in a relationship with Netflix!"

But it is what it is. With people binge-ing sometimes for 10-12 hours straight, Netflix broke media-myth number one — that audience has short attention span, so 'keep it short, stupid' — a thumb-rule that content heads would strongly adhere to, for everything, from cinema, TV, to newspapering. Which is clearly not true, as Sarandos reveals, "Our shortest show is Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. The average episode is 18 minutes long. But the average watch-time for the show is over an hour and half! So they binge-watch even 18-minute interviews!" I'm a little surprised by this. Not the numbers. But the fact that Sarandos is talking numbers at all. Netflix is notoriously secretive about sharing any kind of viewership data. "Ah, I think you can write it," he assures, thankfully. As chief content officer of Netflix, the company he's been with since 2000, Sarandos currently marshals unheard-of resources — production budget alone of $8 billion a year, for one — making him arguably the most powerful man in global entertainment.

He needs no ad-revenues, or a theatrical run (though some Netflix films do open in select cinemas at the same time as they drop online, as Alfonso Cuaron's Roma, or Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, inevitably will). The productions are directly funded by 137 million subscribers, or members, as they're called. Relying far more on instinct than regular Hollywood studios, Netflix also does no focus-group surveys: "The only audience-test we do is in comedies, [to check] for laughs, that's it," Sarandos points out. Be that as it may, he seems to wear power rather lightly, like his casual, blue polo tee, at the Netflix India office in Bandra-Kurla Complex as he delves into his love for Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather series — why the third part suffered because of devotees' insurmountable expectations ("problem with anticipation, and art") — or how he stays up any night that Sidney Lumet's The Verdict shows up on TV (yes, he still watches TV).

Sarandos inevitably comes across as a pucca fan-boy that he would've started off as — having led the non-linear transition from TV, VHS, DVD to OTT — rather than a hardened, know-it-all studio-suit, merely studying demography, or counting numbers. You can sense that in the choices he's made. Media-myth number two that Netflix irreversibly broke was that people don't enjoy foreign language, subtitled, or dubbed entertainment: "I still argue with people who try to tell me that Narcos is not in Spanish! It really is. We made it. We know!" The immediate outcome of this is one can instantly see all kinds of story-telling/entertainment seamlessly crossing continents, let alone borders as Sarandos self-admittedly sticks to the credo: "The more authentic, the more global."

Netflix landed in India in January, 2016, with pre-existing content on the OTT app. They started local, original series production with Sacred Games, a heavy, no-holds-barred crime-thriller, which was set in Bombay, and was as Bombay as it gets. Having gone seriously bullish on a "growing market", Netflix currently has six Indian films and 10 original series at various stages of production. The meeting room we're in is named 'Baahubali', after the desi blockbuster; the prequel of which is being readied for Netflix. Earlier in the day, Sarandos was on the sets of Selection Day (series based on Aravind Adiga's novel of the same name).

"And I was thinking: Those kids [on the set], when I see them next, would've become very famous all over the world," he says, recalling how Johnny Carson would go to the French Open, because no one recognised him in France, even as 40 million people watched him every night on The Tonight Show in the US. That's obviously not possible with the same show (with Jimmy Fallon, catering to 190 countries) on Netflix. Right from when he was 12, Sarandos says he knew he'd get into journalism, which he also majored in, but chose not to pursue after college, because he thought he wasn't "a very good writer." He's sat on thousands of interviews from the other end, over the past couple of decades though. What's that one question that annoys him most, I ask, before we sign off: "What's your favourite Netflix show? This is an impossible thing for me to say out loud! Glad you didn't ask." No point!

Melissa D'Costa D'Silva (DNA; November 21, 2017)

While the world is turning upside down obsessing over Eleven and her gang in Stranger Things, actress Vidya Balan has chosen to remain a stranger to all that’s happening in the sleepy town of Hawkins. And it’s not just Stranger Things, Vidya admits to not watching a single episode of Game of Thrones, choosing to stay away from all the violence and gore from both Westeros and Mindhunter. On the occasion of World Television Day today, we got Vidya to tell us about the shows she loves, the roles she would like to essay and more.

ON BEING A STRANGER TO STRANGER THINGS
When quizzed about her favourite television shows/web series, Vidya shares, “I am heartbroken that we won’t be seeing another season of House Of Cards. I was crazy about Mad Men, too. I liked watching Downton Abbey, and Girls, and I absolutely love Narcos. I am not the Stranger Things sort of a person. I can’t watch it. I tried watching Black Mirror, but it’s extremely disturbing. I also tried watching Mindhunter. However, within the first five minutes, I just gave up. It’s too brutal. I don’t watch Game Of Thrones either. I tried watching it, but I found it too graphic. I can’t deal with all that violence.”

ON WANTING TO PLAY A DRUG PEDDLER
While Vidya is clear about the shows she won’t watch ever, she is also loyal to certain shows like the House of Cards and Narcos. In fact, when quizzed about the role she would like to essay from her favourite shows, without batting an eyelid, she says, “Pablo Escobar. I would love to do a Narcos, and play that character. I was actually offered a film about a lady drug peddler who is a big shot, but I didn’t do it. However, as a series, it might be very interesting, but then, now Narcos is already done. So, you don’t want to repeat the same thing but something like that or maybe a political drama. The only thing that has got me interested in politics is House of Cards. Another old interesting HBO series I saw was Six Feet Under. I thought the writing in that was brilliant. I would love to do a drama or a thriller. I also like True Detective a lot, which is an old show.”

Clearly, it’s drama and thrillers that appeal to Vidya as a viewer and an actor. We would like to see her in both.