A writer-director and his dialogue writer wife talk of creating characters through the lockdown as their only link to the fictional universe they know as reality
Aastha Atray Banan (MID-DAY; April 5, 2020)

It was during the making of the 2013 film, Mere Dad Ki Maruti that Neeraj Udhwani and Ishita Moitra first met. Udhwani had written the story and screenplay and Moitra, the dialogues. They started off as colleagues, moved to being friends and married three years later. "Because we started off as colleagues, we are able to maintain a working relationship despite the personal equation," says Moitra, 36. Udhwani's directorial debut, Maska, starring Manisha Koirala, premiered on Netflix last week. He is also writer for the show, while Moitra has worked on the dialogues.

Maska is the story of following your dreams and in a sense, Udhwani's ode to the Irani cafés he grew up around in King's Circle, Matunga. "Pop culture tells us to follow our dreams. But millennials believe they have untapped potential. Social media adds to this feeling of, I am not doing enough. Maska takes a look at this," says Udhwani about the show that looks at a young man who ditches a family-run Irani café to pursue his acting dream.

Moitra's upcoming project is Amazon Prime's Four More Shots Please, which is in its second season. She says, this time, the show focuses on the four women protagonists navigating Mumbai. "It's bolder, sassier and deeper. We have peeled a few more layers off everyone."

The couple says they have taken the Coronavirus lockdown well, given that they are habituated to working from home. Udhwani admits, "I admire her focus. She is a trooper. For the first few days, I watched the news 24/7 and was convinced that the world was going to end. It's after the appreciative messages for Maska that I am in a better place."

The trick, they say, for couples who work together, is to put work before everything else. This means they offer honest feedback and treat each other like they would a colleague. "For Maska, I asked him to give me the screenplay only when it was locked, so I could write the dialogues. It's not like, we live together so, here is one scene, read it!" says Moitra, and Udhwani laughs, "But yes, we do talk about work all the time. So, I say, what's for lunch? And then, 'what are you planning to do about so-and-so bit in the script?' There are no breaks from work."

Like the rest of Mumbai, the couple is waiting for the lockdown to end and see under-progress projects come to fruition. Moitra has written the dialogues for Shakuntala Devi's biopic starring Vidya Balan, and Udhwani is lead writer for cricket-inspired drama, Inside Edge Season 3. "This is not our real life. This is a dream. Real was what was before the pandemic. The only link we have to that life is writing and creating. We will do that till we wake up."

An international study reveals that female characters get all the worst lines in films. In Bollywood, it couldn't be truer. These are the writers challenging that notion
Aastha Atray Banan (MID-DAY; August 20, 2017)

Writer Suhani Kanwar (above) went to cinemas halls a couple of times to gauge the audience reaction to her 2014 release Ragini MMS 2. Her favourite scene had actor Sunny Leone (who plays herself in the film), being told that 'real' actors elicit emotion in films, while all Sunny does is pretend to have orgasms (in her adult films). So Sunny goes on to do a Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, moaning and arching her back in pleasure. She elicits such emotion in her co-actor in the scene, that he, the 'real' actor forgets his lines. "There was this uncomfortable silence in the hall, followed by men laughing at the dumbstruck guy.. but actually, they were laughing at themselves, because the guy on screen was saying exactly what they think. Those are the men the scene was targeted at... the ones who watch adult films but also judge the women in them. If I, for one moment, made them uncomfortable with their own hypocrisy, I did my job" says the 36-year-old, whose more recent work is the acclaimed Lipstick Under My Burkha, for which she also wrote the screenplay.

A recent study by USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL) which will be published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, scanned over 1,000 film scripts and found that even if female characters were removed from the plot, there'd be little difference. In an interview, Anil Ramakrishna, one of the study's researchers, said, "Writers consciously, or subconsciously, agree to established norms about gender that are built into their word choices." In the Indian film industry, we wouldn't need a study to tell us that the gender roles are skewed. Women are objectified as either the vamp or sexy savitri, sati savitri or avenging martyr. It's only in the last few years that movies like Queen, Kahaani, Tanu Weds Manu and now Lipstick have challenged what female characters can say on screen.

"I don't use the word heroine, because I feel that the roles in my stories are characters. And, their dialogues should be honest and should remain true to them and the context," says Alankrita Shrivastava, writer and director of Lipstick. "Dialogues cannot be forced on someone for the sake of sending a message."


Lipstick Under My Burkha director and writer Alankrita Shrivastava (centre) with the cast of her film, Ratna Pathak Shan and Konkana Sen Sharma

Shrivastava, who also made the Gul Panag-starrer Turning 30, adds that she has the liberty to say something like that because she doesn't come from the Bollywood tradition of dialogue writers. "Since I write and make my own movies, I have control. Otherwise, storytelling is controlled by men. Female characters usually lack nuance and sensitivity. An equal and opposite content should also exist."

Kanwar, who also wrote a show called Swim Team for Channel V (with two young girls training to swim for the Olympics), says that women writers have to unlearn the process of discounting their own stories and writing from the male perspective. "We have been censoring ourselves, because we've been trained to think there isn't a market for what we have to say. I always want to say something, on an hourly basis, and some people find that tiresome. I also don't agree when people ask, 'is this the right time', because there's never going to be the perfect time to go out and demand your rights. We just need to keep telling our stories."

Her sentiment is echoed by Lipstick dialogue writer Gazal Dhaliwal (right), who tries to explain the dialogue writing process in a simple yet effective way, "An important rule for me is to not become preachy in order to make a statement. Else, I risk losing my audience. Leela's lament stated in a simple line, 'Aapko pata hai hamaari galti kya hai? Hum sapne bohot dekhte hain', according to me, is more effective than a long speech about women living oppressed lives."

Writer Ishita Moitra (below), currently writing Alt Balaji's The Test Case starring Nimrat Kaur as the first Indian Army officer to fight at the front, was struck by how things have changed when she watched the 90s classic, Ghar Ho To Aisa on TV recently. "There is a good bahu and a bad bahu, and the bad bahu teaches the other to rebel. But, in the end, the good bahu realises that she should resist change, as her child also has to grow up in the same house. Movies wanted to stop the rebellion. And, I figured, that a man must have written that." Moitra, who has also written Noor and dialogues for Ragini MMS 2, feels that things are changing, albeit slowly, but players like Ekta Kapoor and actors like Anushka Sharma, Alia Bhatt, Vidya Balan and Kangana Ranaut who want, need and ask for stronger characters, ensure that writers like her can create better roles for women.

"In mainstream films, these actors are saying, give me something to do. Like in Sultan, in the last scene, Anushka tells Salman's character, 'don't give up, we are sportsmen'. She doesn't say 'tumhe mere pyar ki kasam'," says the 34-year old. "I also think producers and directors are changing. They fear they come across as regressive."