Gehraiyaan director Shakun Batra on film’s plot tw, reveals he got abusive emails: ‘Started to question if I am rational…’
Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan, starring Deepika Padukone, Siddhant Chaturvedi, Ananya Panday and Dhairya Karwa released on Amazon Prime to polarised reviews. While many called it a ‘domestic noir’ and praised the film for its dark undertones, others felt that it was entirely too choppy and fragmented, with a peculiar tw in the second half. The film takes a deep dive into the darker side of modern relationships, and explores different kinds of bonds between people in the film.
Talking to Film Companion, Shakun said that he felt a ‘cognitive dissonance, initially, owing to the contrasting opinions. He also mentioned the abusive email that he received where a person threw cuss words at him saying that he shouldn’t have made the film. Yet on the other hand, there was another psycholog who reached out to him asking about the reason behind his characters, which brought out more dissonance. “I started to question of not just whether I am rational, but everyone who was agreeing or disagreeing, whether they are a rational. When I made the film, I wanted a conversation, about why the characters choose to make these decisions. Now this conversation is happening, I can’t choose to correct these conversations, it’s not my job to correct someone’s interpretation. That’s what it has become, and it is poles apart. I’ve to take it in, that the truth is all of it.”
Discussing whether Gehraiyaan was ‘domestic noir’ as it has been often called, Shakun explained that’s why they stopped calling it so during the marketing, as he was advised against it, and as an afterthought he was pleased because he wanted to see how the ‘surprises’– which means a change in genre halfway through the film—would land. He also opened about the complexity of the emotional scene between Naseeruddin Shah and Deepika Padukone in the film, where the barriers are swept away between the two of them, and how he discussed the scene with his girlfriend the night before they shot it. “I always knew it was a pivotal moment, I shot this scene earlier—and it was much shorter, and my co-writer saw the scene and said we need this to go further. So we did another draft of it, I was sitting with my girlfriend and telling her about it, and she told me things that stayed on mind.” The scene was trimmed, edited, discussed on various calls, and he said that he was so nervous before they executed the scene again.
Gehraiyaan is streaming on Amazon Prime.
