Anvita Dutt, who directed the recent Netflix original, Bulbbul, became friends with Karnesh Ssharma, Anushka Sharma’s elder brother and co-founder of their production house, Clean Slate Films, on the sets of a film almost a decade ago. When Dutt told him the story of Bulbbul, he told her that if he ever turned producer—he was in the merchant navy at the time—he would take it up. It took a long time, but he did keep his word. Starting with NH10 (2015), Ssharma talks about his five-year journey as a producer and the stories the brother-sister duo choose to tell.
Since Bulbbul was one of the first scripts you heard, was it instrumental in you turning producer?
Well, part of it has to be it, yes. Anushka and I would always discuss while watching films from across the globe and about making similar cinema, which later happened to be Bulbbul, NH10, Paatal Lok (2020), Pari (2018) and Phillauri (2017). That was also our taste in cinema. It so happened that when Anushka decided that we should start producing films, I remember going back to Anvita and telling her that ‘it would be great if we could produce it for you’.
There is a sociopolitical context to all the projects that you have taken up. Was that a conscious decision?
It is totally incidental. You cannot think that you would want to talk about a particular thing today. Most of our content does not have [the context] as the frontrunner. These are layers which are revealed or explored through characters in the story. They are not out there to make a statement. It is, I think, part of our personalities, Anushka’s and mine. We are very laidback, unsocial people. That is why our stories are laidback and layered with something interesting. This is going to be the mantra in future, too.
What about the negative feedback you got for choosing to tell stories with difficult themes, like in the case of Paatal Lok?
This is all we know. We feel we are sensible people and sensible citizens. We do not say anything just for the sake of saying it. Cinema is subject to opinions. When you welcome the good opinions, you should also welcome the bad ones and introspect. Introspection at every level, not just with respect to telling stories but individually also, is very important. That is why Anushka named the company Clean Slate, because after every project, we start with a fresh slate, without the baggage of the previous films.