In the fortnight since The Romantics dropped online, the docu-series has caught the attention of a wide-ranging audience — from movie buffs who grew up on Yash Chopra’s offerings, to aspiring filmmakers. Now, director Smriti Mundhra has double reason to celebrate. The Netflix documentary will be screened for students at Harvard University tomorrow. Not just that, the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) has decided to include it in their Winter Film Appreciation course.

The four-part series traces the late Yash Chopra’s journey as he brought a new cinematic language to Hindi films, and how it influenced the country’s cultural landscape over the past 50 years. Through the film appreciation course, film students will watch, dissect and understand the filmmaker and his son Aditya Chopra’s brand of cinema.

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mundhra says it is important to explore the work of one of the most successful directors of our country. “As a former film student, I studied the work of auteurs from all over the world. It always bothered me that my peers and I weren’t taught about the great filmmakers of Indian cinema. The Romantics is my attempt to shed light on the craft, journey, and global impact of Yash Chopra, and the generation of filmmakers and movie-goers he influenced,” she states.

Besides featuring an exclusive interview of the reclusive Aditya, The Romantics sees many stars from the Hindi film industry — including Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Rani Mukerji, Anushka Sharma, Hrithik Roshan and Ranbir Kapoor — come together to pay tribute to the late filmmaker.

From bringing producer Aditya Chopra out of the shadows in front of the camera for the first time to late actor Rishi Kapoor’s last interview — the docuseries The Romantics is stirring up quite a buzz. And director Smriti Mundhra, also known as the creator of Indian Matchmaking, didn’t anticipate just “how much the series would tap into people’s sense of nostalgia and love of cinema”. Excerpts:

It has been a journey of over three years since we started this process and began the research — watching a lot of films, going through the whole catalogue of the production house and what was happening around the time these films were made. All this [was] because we wanted to paint a larger picture in terms of what movies tell us about the time we live in.

One of the reasons I wanted to tell the story through the lens of Yash Chopra was because of the longevity of his career and how it started in the aftermath of the Partition. I realised how closely these elements of the political and socioeconomic climate are braided into their personal story.

Once I could show him what the series and telling of the story of his father would be with his perspective, that’s probably what convinced him, finally. Anyone who has worked in any capacity with Aditya Chopra can tell you that he holds creative integrity to the highest standard, and will move mountains to make sure that the creative integrity of whatever project he is involved with, is intact.

He kept a cool head with me. He had some time after seeing it to just absorb before I talked to him. Maybe if he was really angry, or horrified, he conveyed that to somebody else, but he didn’t convey that to me. After he saw it, the first conversation that I had with him was him saying, ‘Okay, I see what you mean’.

It is one of the highlights of my career. I feel so lucky and privileged that I got that opportunity, not knowing that just a month later, we were going to lose him. He seemed his best on the day I interviewed him. He looked great, was gregarious, very chatty and charming. There was Neetu ji (Kapoor, actor and Rishi’s wife) with him, and they just had such great banter going on. I’m so glad that I got to interview him when he was in the mood to talk, especially given that it was his last interview.

New Delhi: India will get a bigger slice of Netflix’s $17 billion content budget given the growing engagement with its offerings and rising revenue from viewers in the country, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said at the Economic Times Global Business Summit on Friday.

“In India, we’ve had the best year of our existence,” he said. “Our content watching grew by 30% last year in India and our revenue grew by 25%.”

Engagement is the key measure of success, Sarandos said, and growth indicators have to start with this.

“Do people care enough to spend their viewing time with you? Are they spending their screen time with Netflix? That's why that engagement metric is so important,” he said during the session, Cracking The Content Code.

“It wouldn't have happened if it wasn't tied to that engagement lift. Subscriber numbers make nice headlines, but they're not a real business metric. What is behind that subscriber number? Is there engagement? Is there revenue? Is there profit with Netflix? Yes, there is,” Sarandos said.

The company plans to plough more resources into India. “You are basically trying to constantly get just ahead of or just behind the growth in the market and figure out what's working and keep investing,” he said. “So I would say that we are going to be investing more and more in India as we continue to grow engagement and revenue.”

Netflix has a strong slate of content coming up for India, he said. “This idea of really getting into the grid, into the rhythm and the groove of local tastes and local desire…I think we're better at that than we ever were. The reason that we got there is that our team that runs India, runs it from India,” Sarandos said.

The key to success in the country was having teams on the ground with a feel for what people want, he said. “A lot of companies that try to run India out of California get frustrated early on because they just don't learn anything. Here, our team really does understand the local culture and the local storytellers. And they themselves are part of the local audience — that gives us a large advantage. That's why we've invested so heavily on not just production in India, but we have 250 people in an office in Mumbai. We have an office in Delhi. These are people who really care about making great content in India.”

Netflix has produced 100 original projects in India so far with 28 of them last year. Sarandos said the India team is getting better every day. “What I figured out early on when we started launching in various countries is that you didn't learn much in one country that was helpful in the next country,” he said.

“You have to be there, you have to be on the ground, and you have to understand consumer tastes and you have to understand the culture. You have to understand the history of the industry.”

He cited new Netflix release, The Romantics, about the legacy of Yash Chopra, as an example. “You have to understand creators in that country,” he said. “What are the challenges to getting movies made and series made? And in the case of India, I think India has got this beautiful, rich cinema culture and it was not that much around television at that time when we first got here. So, Sacred Games was our kind of early attempt to say, well, what if you took the principles of cinema and infused them into television and the Indian audiences loved that.”

His top priority is reigniting growth at the company, Sarandos said.

More than 25 years ago, when Raj and Simran’s love in the lanes of London faced patriarchal conservativeness, an Indian-American teenager felt like someone had mirrored her identity crisis as a young member of the Indian diaspora.

Unsurprisingly, as the fan grew into a filmmaker, Smriti Mundhra desired to pay homage to the man behind the film, Yash Chopra. The result is the Netflix documentary, The Romantics.

“I wanted to explore the films that were important to me and formative in my adolescent years,” says Los Angeles-based Mundhra. To document the legacy of the late filmmaker, whose career spanned five decades, was anything but easy. To top it, she wanted to go beyond Chopra, and dip into the contribution of his son, Aditya, who has been at the helm of the production house since his father’s death in 2013.

“I first pitched the idea to YRF [Yash Raj Films] since they have the archival material, behind the scenes footage, no one had seen before. I was sure that it existed somewhere in a vault. So, I approached them to tell the story of Hindi cinema history through the lens of Yash Chopra and the studio he built. The timing was right because the studio was approaching its 50th anniversary. They were in a reflective headspace.”

The next hurdle before Mundhra was to be able to schedule meetings with the stars central to Chopra’s universe. “Everybody was willing and eager to talk because of the love and respect they have for him. But coordinating actors’ schedules was quite the challenge,” says the director, who eventually managed to get Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, the late Rishi Kapoor, Rani Mukerji, Madhuri Dixit and Katrina Kaif among others to be part of the series.

Now, she had to convince Aditya Chopra himself. Famous for being the recluse, he is behind the running joke in Bollywood: Aditya Chopra is merely a rumour. His love for his father and his work managed to compel him to sit before a camera for an interview for the first time in 20 years.

“It was harder than coordinating an interview with Salman Khan, honestly. But we managed. He has so much respect and regard for his father that it was difficult for him to say, no,” Mundhra says.

While archival interviews of Yash Chopra that find their way into the series take the audience through his perspective on movies and approach to filmmaking, Aditya’s interview delves into how Yash Raj Films turned into the Yash Raj Studio. Mundhra found a stark difference between the way the two think; the reason perhaps for the director’s realization that Aditya is the producer Yash Chopra could never be.

“He is knowledgeable about the film industry in a way that’s similar to his father, but also very different. Yash Chopra was all heart, passion and love. Aditya is all brain, he is so smart. What they have in common is utmost respect for the audience. Their common and ultimate goal is to please the viewer.”

And so, the late veteran responded to the sentiment of the time. The initial years saw him make movies inspired by a broken post-Partition India, whether it was Dhool Ka Phool (1959) or Dharamputra (1961). His inclination towards poetry and human vulnerability was evident in the 1973 hit Daag, which was also his first film as independent producer. And while he knew that he had found a lifetime companion in romance, he reacted to the anti-establishment sentiment in 1975 India by giving the audience Deewaar. As Chopra evolved, so did his hero, eventually moving away from the “angry, young man” image to the softer, sometimes messier individual unafraid to love.

Aditya picked up from where his father left off and took it a notch higher when he made Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, bringing to screen a hero who was desired by women and whom men aspired to be like.

This progression is what makes Hindi cinema unique, thinks Mundhra. “It was interesting for me to see how the male archetype evolved over the course of the studio’s filmography.... from say, Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar to him two years later in Kabhi Kabhie—dramatically different. And then, in 2015, you have Ayushmann Khurrana in Dum Laga Ke Haisha. The idea of what a leading man or leading lady should be is constantly evolving, film after film, generation after generation,. And you see lots of unexpected heroes and heroines along the way, which I really love about Hindi cinema,” she says, adding that it was “incredible” to speak to perhaps the biggest of Yash Raj heroes, Shah Rukh Khan.

“He looked at Yash Chopra as a father figure. They were extremely close. And I think there’s still a bit of sadness [in Khan] that he’s no longer with us. Dare I say, I think he misses him. I don’t want to project too much, but I think there’s a [special] bond between the Chopra family and him. Obviously, their fates are intertwined too. Shah Rukh’s career is closely linked with YRF and its success. It’s like they’ve grown up together; the studio and the star.”

And while the hero was at the centre of it all, Chopra was faithful to portraying female desire, aspiration and dilemma. He didn’t view the woman’s identity as one derived from the actions of men, but rather made it one nurtured by agency and the ownership of her aesthetics and fallacies. Both, female film stars and women viewers wanted to be Yash Chopra heroines.

“There are ways in which he portrayed his female characters with respect for their desires and wants... I think those films were ahead of their time. He was sensitive to a woman’s point of view, which I don’t think too many filmmakers from his generation can claim,” she says, adding that while movies by Chopra, his son and the studio itself have been criticized for lacing stories with lavishness that only the privileged can afford, their complex themes, provocative and progressive reflections on relationships and love, made them stand the test of time.

“He would package them like big, multi starrers, with beautiful costumes. So, you didn’t realize immediately that he was gradually shifting your idea of what conventional love and marriage is.”

Mundhra rates her interview with the late Rishi Kapoor as one of her next favourites. She shot with him and his actor wife Neetu Kapoor a month before the veteran passed, in April 2020. “There was some energy that day [in the room] when we were talking... we talked for more than three hours. He wanted to keep talking, and had so many memories to share. He offered great insight. It was a magical conversation,” she recalls.

The documentary appears to have satiated the fan and filmmaker in Mundhra. She now hopes that the experience does to the audience what it did for her: bring them closer to the movies. “What we really want, as humans, and especially as Indians, is to remember that we are passionate about cinema. It’s so central to our culture, history and tradition; it’s a part of our contribution to the world and people are excited to be reminded of this, and don’t like to feel cynical when they think of Hindi films or Bollywood.”

In a Yash Chopra movie, one could be assured of a sweeping romance, melodious songs, and Switzerland. It is said that the late filmmaker visited the country for his honeymoon and was smitten with it, going on to shoot many of his films there.

So, as Smriti Mundhra’s docu-series The Romantics — that celebrates his movies — drops online today, Jungfrau Railways of Switzerland has paid a tribute to the legend. A special ice sculpture of Chopra will be unveiled this month at the Ice Palace in Jungfraujoch.

Remo Kaser, sales director, Jungfrau Railways, reveals, “Yash Chopra has presented the beauty of Switzerland, especially the Jungfrau region, to Indians across the world for generations. Indians who come to Jungfraujoch have spoken to us about how his romantic films have pushed them to visit the region.” 

Throughout the month, the Swiss authorities will celebrate the filmmaker’s legacy across the locations where he shot his films, including Chandni (1989) and Darr (1993). Besides the ice sculpture, the authorities will host screenings of the Netflix docu-series, and play his films’ trailers at these venues.