Challenging to keep audience invested in story: Sujoy Ghosh

A haunted house may seem like the perfect setting for a ghost story but "Typewriter" director Sujoy Ghosh says the challenge is always to keep the audience engaged in the series format where the protagonists are children.

Ghosh has delivered one of the best thrillers in Bollywood with "Kahaani" but making a shift to the digital medium with the new Netflix series was not easy for him.

The director says he had to unlearn many things as a writer as he "wasn't sure if he could write a story for the digital format" but it turned out to be a learning experience.

"Irrespective of the story and the format, the struggle always is to keep the audience invested from the beginning till the end," he told PTI in an interview.

"I had to be confident that I could write a story for a series where all the characters would be given equal importance and they would be dealt with in detail. When you are writing (for the web), you have to unlearn what you have learnt in films. Once I made myself believe that I could write a series then only I decided to direct."
"It is a wider world, the characters are much broader. Everybody is equal in the series. I cannot take a short-cut."
"I knew it would have been a struggle to get that film made because making every film has been a struggle for me, even 'Kahaani'."
"The trick is in representing it differently. Like, in a ghost story what happens when you go to a new villa? Every ghost comes in the night what if it came out in the day? So you try and change things."