In Abhirup Ghosh’s film Mrigaya, four cops team up to hunt down a dangerous criminal. Mrigaya is Ghosh’s attempt at making an original Bengali mainstream film, which has a “good story inspired by real events, told with a lot of Bengali swagger”. “In the film, our most stylised mass moments have a strong Bengali cultural connect,” said Ghosh. The concept of hunting plays a major role in the film, with multiple people hunting each other. Mrigaya — starring Vikram Chatterjee, Ritwick Chakraborty, Susmita Chatterjee, Priyanka Sarkar, Anirban Chakrabarti, Saurav Das and Rezwan — is set to release on June 27. A t2 chat with Abhirup Ghosh...
You are making a comeback to the big screen after six years.
While I have been away from the big screen, in the last six years, I have been occupied with shows like Rahasya Romancha Series, Byadh, The Bengal Scam, etc. It’s not that I have not tried to make films for theatrical release in these years, but the universe probably had other plans. Byadh was originally made as a film, but ended up as a web series. Similarly, Brombhodoityo released as a web film. I have been waiting to make something fit for the big screen for quite some time. This ensured that in series like The Bengal Scam, I tried to give audiences the experience of a masala potboiler film in the guise of a series. While my work was appreciated a lot by audiences and I got a lot of love for my works in the series format, I still craved for the big screen.
Last year, you directed the JioHotstar series Reeta Sanyal.
It was my first Hindi language work, and I got a lot of exposure and got to access a bigger budget and equipment that we usually don’t get in Bengal. Working in Mumbai also broadened my point of view and allowed me to experiment with technique. I got to learn a lot and experimented a lot in the action scenes of Reeta Sanyal. All this definitely prepared me strongly for my return to the big screen with Mrigaya. Over the years, though I have worked on OTT, my lensing and storytelling have always aimed at big-screen experiences. Finally, with Mrigaya, I have tried to create an engaging and satisfying big-screen experience for the audience.
How was Reeta Sanyal different in terms of scale and scope?
Doing a series for a national platform like JioHotstar was definitely a huge learning experience for me. I got quite the culture shock while working in Mumbai. The sheer respect the crew shows to everyone is striking. Also, though I was an outsider, the producers, Rajeshwar Nair and Krishnan Iyer, really made me feel at home and backed me up in whatever I wanted to do. Director Rohhan Ghose had introduced me to them. I got a tremendous amount of creative freedom. The scale of the show was quite big and it was an action-packed pulp series. I experimented a lot with the structure of the show, the storytelling and the action.
The fact that the series had a good budget enabled me to try things that I could not even dream of in Bengal. For example, I opted for long, one-take sequences where characters go from the present to the past and come back to the present again, all in a single shot, with light schemes changing during the shot itself. These bits were highly complicated and sometimes took over 17-18 retakes.
But the cast and crew were always super patient with me. With the action, I used a lot of rigs and got access to a huge arsenal of state-of-the-art guns, which really took the action to the next level. Also, the budget enabled the actors to rehearse a bit with the action team so as to ensure that they were comfortable and prepared on set. This made the shooting process faster too. The scale of shoots in Mumbai is bigger simply because of the basic comfort the production teams provide to the entire cast and crew. We have often seen the junior crew and extras get treated in extremely inhumane ways in Bengal.
However, I was pleasantly surprised to see everyone get treated with a lot of respect and love over there. A major challenge of shooting Reeta Sanyal was the fact that we shot it in peak monsoon. I had heard a lot of romantic things about the Mumbai rains. Let’s just say, I have had enough monsoon romance for one lifetime. We had to brave stormy weather almost every day and this made the shoot extremely hectic. But overall, it was a highly memorable experience.
How challenging was it to design the fight scenes for Mrigaya?
I have always dabbled with action, in almost all my cinematic endeavours. Being an avid action film fan, I find action exciting to shoot. However, as action is not a dominant genre in Bengal at the moment, there is a lack of adequate infrastructure. There is not enough practice, which can make the choreography look a bit dated if not carefully designed. I have always taken a lot of pain to design action pieces effectively to keep things exciting and new.
I have tried my best to incorporate some original elements to give a zing of local culture. While working on Mrigaya, I was fresh out of the experience of shooting Reeta Sanyal with a top-notch Mumbai crew. I used whatever I had learnt during that shoot to elevate the action scenes of Mrigaya. The local action crew has done a wonderful job. Luckily, my producers gave us enough time and budget to push the limits and try to create never-before-seen action pieces in Mrigaya. We have tried to create innovative and stylised action pieces in this film. We are really hopeful that audiences will have a blast. Even the actors, though not that used to doing action, were very excited to perform the action bits. We had a lot of fun putting our cast in uncomfortable, yet exciting situations. It was like an adventure for them.
The story of Mrigaya is inspired by a real incident.
When I was approached by Debasis Datta, officer-in-charge of Maniktala police station, with this story, I was instantly hooked. I could have opted to make a very grounded, realistic film with the same story and cast. But I chose a more mainstream approach to ensure that the film caters to the masses. With my writers, Aritra Banerjee and Soumit Deb, I added a lot of entertainment quotient to ensure that different audience segments can have a blast watching this film. Soumit Deb’s dialogues, some of which have already gone viral after the trailer and teaser, have also added that additional masala texture.
Also, the story allowed the inclusion of an exciting ensemble cast. Multistarrer films are not very common in Bengal, I guess, at the moment. Hence, I tried to put together an ensemble that could excite the audiences effectively. A major challenge in making this film was to get the cast right.
It rides heavily on the chemistry between the different actors.
There are only a handful of exciting actors in Bengal and all of them have to do numerous films and series every year. Ritwick Chakraborty and Vikram Chatterjee have diametrically opposite personalities and acting styles, which made for great chemistry. Also, there is a lot of banter between Anirban Chakrabarti and Rezwan Rabbani Sheikh in the film, as they play rivals. Their chemistry was great too. Another major issue was casting the bad guy. We needed somebody who could really stand up to the leads.
Saurav Das plays a character who is larger than life.
We took a gamble, but I feel it paid off better than everyone’s expectations. His Sardaar is a villain to remember. Another challenge was creating original, exciting action scenes. We did not have a big enough budget to source action teams from Mumbai or South India. So our action is entirely homegrown. Within our restricted budget, we pushed our limits to create spectacle through cool intro scenes, chase sequences and big action pieces.
Our action team, led by Somnath Biswas (Baban) and Chandan, have put in a lot of hard work into bringing my designs alive. The climax, particularly, was very demanding as it practically features a war-like sequence where our protagonists stand off against 100 assailants. Our biggest constraint was time, as we had to shoot the film in 20 days. All the actors are super busy, so managing their dates was a huge hassle too. Ultimately, the schedules became very hectic.
We had to shoot the climax action bits during the day, and then follow it up with the song shoots all through the night. We often ended up shooting almost 24 hours at a stretch. Another challenge was shooting the item number sequence. We had to create an elaborate mela set very fast. We shot the song on one of the coldest nights of last year. Managing the hundreds of junior artistes and dancers was difficult due to the insane hours and freezing cold. It was extremely sporting of Susmita Chatterjee to pull off the sequence effortlessly.