Her first film Nil Battey Sannata — a slice-of-life story about a mother who enrols in the same class as her daughter — was unanimously praised and also turned out to be a sleeper hit. This Friday, Ashwini Iyer Tiwari returns with Bareilly Ki Barfi, a tale of love and relationships in small-town India. Starring Ayushmann Khurrana, Rajkummar Rao and Kriti Sanon, the film has already won praise for its quirky and humorous trailer. t2 caught up with Ashwini — who quit a successful career as executive director of ad agency Leo Burnett to pursue her filmmaking dreams — on Bareilly Ki Barfi and on her filmmaker husband Nitesh Tiwari, the man behind Dangal.

The trailer of Bareilly Ki Barfi has a Woody Allen-Sai Paranjpye look and feel and I just read somewhere that you are greatly influenced by their cinema…

I looooove Sai Paranjype… I really want to meet her! She made such awesome films out of mundane situations. Here characters were so next-door. In Woody Allen’s films, the corniest jokes turn out to be the funniest. Only he can deliver the weirdest lines with the best straightforward face, without even an iota of overacting! Subtlety is the trademark of both these filmmakers and I have always liked that kind of space.
My effort was to take something that was slice-of-life, but make it quirky. And I like flawed characters. No one is perfect… flaws make a person beautiful. I also took quite a bit from my own life and people close to me. Like my mother is a teacher and so is Bitti’s (played by Kriti Sanon) mother. Like my mother, Bitti’s mom (Seema Pahwa) has a habit of speaking loudly even when she’s sitting close to the person she’s speaking to because she’s so used to doing that as a teacher. 

The nicest feedback is actually what I got on Twitter, when someone wrote saying that no matter how much humour the film seems to have, there’s also a strong emotional connect. At the end of the day, the attempt is to tell a story from the roots, to tell the story of people who could be guys living next door to you. Bareilly Ki Barfi comes from a very rooted space, like Nil Battey Sannata. The characters are, of course, different. There, it was about a mother-daughter… here it’s a family. Friendships are a huge part of Bareilly Ki Barfi… here we have two boys (Chirag played by Ayushmann Khurrana and Pritam played by Rajkummar Rao) who are very manipulative when it comes to love, but then are also innocent and endearing in some ways. Haven’t we all met such boys in college?

You apparently got the idea of this film from a French book? 

Yes, that’s right. I was coming back to Bombay after the shoot of Nil Battey Sannata and out of habit, I walked into a bookstore at the airport. I picked up a book (Ingredients of Love) and it was so interesting that I read it all through the flight. After Nil Battey… I didn’t want to make something exactly in the same space and I felt that this was a story that would give me the chance to do something new — like romance — within the milieu I was familiar with. But I didn’t really want to get comfortable in the same space… even when I was in advertising I made sure I worked on diverse brands. That’s when you start meeting new people and get to explore different ideas. So even going forward, the effort will be to tell different stories even as I work within some familiar tropes because that’s my core and I wouldn’t want to change that.

Your casting has come in for a lot of praise with Ayushmann, Rajkummar and Kriti looking like they have been these characters all their lives… 

Ayushmann has very middle-class roots and he’s lived a certain kind of life that I was looking for in Chirag. Rajkummar has lived in Gurgaon all his life… he’s lived in a community like this and has seen friends like this. I have Seema Pahwa and Pankaj Tripathi who come in with their own experiences. Kriti Sanon, although she’s done only glamorous roles so far, comes from a very simple Delhi background… her father is a chartered accountant, her mom is a professor and she herself studied engineering… she’s very intelligent. When all the actors come in with their own experiences, then it really helps the film. Like Kriti’s mom calls her from Delhi a couple of times a day and asks, ‘Khana khaya?’ So some things never change… moms never change… doesn’t really matter where you come from. Also, I felt the three lead characters bring in a very unique pairing. 

Are the emotions still the same while making your second film as they were during the first?

The emotions are still the same. I still have butterflies in my stomach… even now as I am talking to you! (Laughs) It doesn’t matter if it’s your first film or your 40th… it’s still your baby. That emotion will never change. I will still be a newcomer when I make my 10th film. I will still be going back to the roots and still be learning. I like to be that way. 

But doesn’t the process get easier?

I would say that it does become better because you have a precedent that people know you for… your first film. People know me now by the film I have made. For the longest time, people didn’t know who the director of Nil Battey Sannata was though they had very good things to say about the film. Now they know my name. 

You had a successful career in advertising. Was filmmaking always the logical next step?

Advertising is a very good training ground if you want to become a filmmaker. Filmmaking was always at the back of my mind… I did make some ad films. I was looking at the right time to make the plunge because you do need quite a bit of experience. Working behind the camera and working on set are two very different things. As a director, people management is very important. I was also waiting for my kids to get slightly older so that they would be comfortable with me being away and exploring a new career. 

So what are the pros and cons, if any, of two filmmakers living under the same roof?

The biggest pro is that we live under the same roof! So if you have an idea in the middle of the night, you can always wake up the other and discuss it! (Laughs) Both Nitesh and I have absolutely no egos. That really helps because we are not judgemental about each other’s work. We are also brutally honest to each other… we have the freedom of telling each other if we don’t like the other’s work.

The con could be that you will end up discussing films 24x7. But that will happen if two doctors also stay with each other, no? What surgery to do, what treatment…. But now that our children have come into our lives, we end up talking about them only!

Priyanka Roy