The Covid effect: Pandemic has enhanced creative output of Indian cinema

Mahesh Narayanan’s C U Soon (Malayalam) is a curious film. Jimmy, a bank employee in Dubai, meets Anu on a dating app. They start chatting and fall in love. Then weird things start happening — Anu is beaten up and Jimmy is taken into custody. Roshan Mathew, Fahadh Faasil and Darshana Rajendran bring alive this staccato tale, told through phone and laptop screens between India, Dubai and the US.
 
C U Soon, however, was shot in Kochi during the pandemic last year. Narayanan had just finished the big-budget Malik when the lockdown delayed its release. “The whole industry went into a bizarre mode; workers and assistant directors were doing odd jobs, selling household goods to survive,” says Narayanan who had discussed the idea of C U Soon with Faasil.
 
The moment the Kerala government allowed it, the duo decided to make the film to provide employment to the industry workers. “C U Soon was written as a screen-based movie, so even if there was no lockdown, it would have been made this way,” Narayanan says.
 
“Eighty per cent of the film is shot on the iPhone. The Dubai scenes were shot in Fahad’s apartments (in Kochi) and the airport ones at Hyatt Hotel.” The Malik shoot had involved over 300 people daily — at times even 2,500. “If I want to make another Malik today, it is not possible,” Narayanan says.
 
As they try to figure out what is possible and what isn’t, Indian filmmakers, writers, technicians and actors are pushing the boundaries of their craft. The results are interesting.
 
C U Soon released on Ama­zon Prime Video in September 2020 to rave reviews.
 
“Covid has changed storyte­ll­ing,” says Vijay Subramaniam, director and head of content, Amazon Prime Video. “It is making storytellers re-examine what we know. Certain stereoty­pes will be broken and new cha­racters and environments created.” Putham Pudhu Kaalai, an anthology of five Tamil short films, or the whimsical Ludo (Hindi) are examples of this.
 
The luxury of time
 
Sanya Malhotra had had a great two years with Badhai Ho and Photograph (Hindi) when the lockdown hit. She used the time to prepare for her upcoming Netflix film Meenakshi Sundareshwar and read scripts. “I realised that there are no work boundaries. We are constantly thinking of work, be it Saturday or Sunday,” she says. Now, except when she is shooting, Malhotra keeps her phone switched off from 8 pm to 11 am. It was while being forced to stay at home that filmmaker Nandini Reddy (of Oh! Baby fame) found her calm. As soon as the lockdown ended, she moved away from her flat in Hyderabad to a home with a garden an hour’s drive from all the action in the Telugu film industry. “These days I have greater clarity about what is not working in my story,” says she.
 
“What you need is time — to read, watch, think,” says Smita Singh Khan, writer (Raat Akeli Hai, Sacred Games).
 
Time is a recurring theme across the creative spectrum. It is also the reason the pandemic has been a luxury for the creative lot.
 
“It has been a gold rush for development without timeline constraints. Our writers are busier than ever, working on both commissioned and their own passion projects,” says Datta Dave, partner, Tulsea, which represents hundreds of writers, filmmakers and other talent.
 
One could argue that there was even more time in the seventies when arthouse cinema began. Why then didn’t it work? “The segmentation of story started because of distribution,” points out Subramaniam.
 
Till the beginning of the millennium, single screens with their need to fill 1,000 seats pushed the making of mass entertainers. There is no way arthouse or independent films, meant for smaller audiences, could survive in this ecosystem. When multiplexes took off after 2000, creators could tell slightly smaller stories such as Iqbal (Hindi) or Natrang (Marathi). They were called “multiplex films”.
 
In 2016, streaming video took the ability to segment the audience and storytelling to another level. It also brought with it a whole array of world content to Indians.

 
Watching Narcos, The Crown, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or Trapped among hundreds of world-class shows has meant “the demand for quality of execution, authentic production values, novelty and variety has increased,” points out Da­nish Khan, business head, Sony Enter­tain­ment Television, Sony LIV & StudioNext, Sony Pictures Networks. The demand to make shows in seasons of 8-10 hours, instead of dailies extending over months or two- or three-hour-long films, forced changes in the creative process, which, in turn, has improved storyte­l­l­ing. “Writing has moved from individ­­uals to a writing room, making it colla­­borative. The director/creative director is the show-runner,” says Khan.

By the end of 2019, there were 60 OTTs (over-the-top platforms) offering films and shows from across the world. That is when the virus arrived on the scene. People then spent long hours with their screens.
 
“The pandemic closed your physical life but opened your mind,” says Khan. “Our street and restaurant food changed completely in the last 20 years because people were open to discovery. Similarly, this genera­tion is open to different stories.”
 
Can the show go on?
 
The simmering hostility between filmmaker Anurag Kashyap and actor Anil Kapoor, who play themselves, turns into a full-scale war in Vikramaditya Motwane’s AK vs AK on Netflix. It is surreal watching Kapoor dance, fight and plead to find where Kashyap has hidden his daughter, actor Sonam Kapoor Ahuja. There is no way this film would have made it to the big screen. It works with an audience of cinema addicts who know the allusions, both personal and professional.
 
“Covid brought an awareness of contemporary reality. Entertainment remains the same; it brings joy, laughter,” says Srishti Behl Arya, director, original film, Netflix India.
 
 When India went into lockdown in 2020, Netflix’s post-production team deployed remote editorial solutions, virtual cutting rooms and set up high-speed internet connections. This allow­ed over 40 editors and assistant editors to work in real time with their directors. The home automated dialogue replacement kits it had sent allowed Nawazuddin Siddiqui to complete the dubbing for Serious Men from his hometown in Budhana in Uttar Pradesh while being directed by Sudhir Mishra over a live stream. “‘The show must go on’ is the mantra,” says Arya.
 
That is also why the pandemic has enhanced the creative output of Indian cinema. It has forced it to think on its feet and come up with ways to tell a better story — and tell it faster and cheaper than anyone else.

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Part 1 of this two-part series appeared on April 22. Read it here