Amazon Prime Video entered the Indian online streaming market much after Netflix. However, Amazon's first Indian original Inside Edge, streamed before Netflix’s Sacred Games (an adaptation of Vikram Chandra’s award-winning novel of the same name) although Netflix had announced the series before its rival. The response to Inside Edge, despite the backing of Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani’s Excel Entertainment, has been tepid.
When Netflix rolls out its first Indian original, the expectations are indeed high, more so because it will be churned out of Phantom Films with Anurag Kashyap as the director and Vikramaditya Motwane as director and show-runner, besides a promising cast, including Saif Ali Khan as inspector Sartaj Singh, Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Ganesh Gaitonde and Radhika Apte as Anjali Mathur. The team, excited as they looked, came together on Friday to make an official announcement before going on floors next week.
Admitting that they have taken a long time to make the series a reality, Motwane says the medium is such that that they have to be fully-prepared because of the measure of the audience. “It is exciting thing, and at the same time really scary that it would be streamed in 190 countries and will be seen by the global audience. Our competition really is Narcos, 13 Reasons Why and House Of Cards, which are wonderful shows. But we want to make a show that is world class and is going to be seen by a global audience.”
The makers confessed that it makes them nervous every day, but the prospect of it is so exciting that they want to keep doing their best, though they don’t see it as different from movies. “It is the same as any other feature film, but this is a lot longer,” said Motwane. “Like an eight-hour feature film,” Kashyap quipped.
The team is excited that they are in for something that they all are passionate about. Set in Mumbai, the book explores the story of a policeman, a criminal overlord and a Bollywood film star, politicians, spies and terrorists. The surprising thing is that when Chandra was researching for Sacred Games and Suketu (Mehta) was researching for Maximum City, Kashyap was researching for Black Friday. “All three of us were together talking to the same people–we go back to then. There is a connection. I want to be honest to the source material. I want to be honest to the script. And it’s not that just because we are doing a Netflix show, we are going to do that little extra. I am only going to translate or give vision to what has come from him (Chandra) and them (the writers–Varun Grover, Vasant Nath, Smita Singh) to me,” said Kashyap while talking about if he would go the extra mile considering the freedom that the platform gives from censorship.
For Chandra, an adaptation of his book fits Netflix well because it will do justice to the multi-cultural aspect of Mumbai and India in general, explored in the book. The book, though in English, brings a multi-lingual flavour of Mumbai and India in general and that Chandra thinks can be justified on a platform like Netflix where language is not a barrier. The cast only agrees. Radhika Apta, who has worked even in the regional film industries, says that it’s binding to work in just one-language. “But this is going to represent the whole country. And our country is so unique, there are so many languages. It’s great to have no barrier,” she adds.
For Kashyap to do this show is very freeing. “When I make films I have to always try to find a balance of what traditionally our cinema has been, struggling how to use elements of popular cinema formats within my story and try to still make it more universal because I also know I have a larger audience outside India. There is less of that pressure here. The pressure definitely is there, but what happens is when psychologically an audience is logging on to Netflix, they know that they are in for an international series and not watching an Indian series or film. That pressure is taken off,” says Kashyap, adding that he is taking it forward very fearlessly. “My fears are about how good justice will I be doing with the material. It’s an opportunity to expand my audience base too. It will give me more freedom in the future to do more stuff. I’d rather (hope) that this creates an expectation of quality for me in the future. And that pressure is always good.”
Kashyap confesses that this would probably be for the first time that he will be reaching out to the maximum number of people in his entire career as a filmmaker. “I am seeing it like I am making a movie for the whole world. I welcome that pressure on me, I want to go with that. For me, seeing it like a web format got over when I saw House of Cards. For me, it’s been over a long time back. I see like a movie and I enjoy it like that. There is nothing it which would make me feel that I would rather go watch a film. It’s really exciting. It’s like going on a first date with that one person you always wanted to go on a date with.”
