EXCLUSIVE | Yashowardhan Mishra: 'Was a privilege to have Sanya Malhotra, Vijay Raaz, and Rajpal Yadav in Kathal'

Yashowardhan Mishra, the director of Netflix’s Kathal- A Jackfruit Mystery, speaks to Firstpost in an exclusive interview about his film that stars Sanya Malhotra, and a lot more.

On why a story around Kathal

When I first came to know about this theft, that was about a decade ago, I was very excited. At that time I was in college and we all used to do a lot of satire, a lot of theater, and make films and short films and stuff like that. I had written the story about a decade ago, and had forgotten about it for 6-7 years. When I met Puneet, I realized our wavelengths really match, our worldviews really match so I thought that I should narrate this incident to her and she really got excited about it. There’s so much meat for a satire to be birthed out of it because it’s so bizarre and so unreal. We then went for a research, me and my co-writer Ashok Mishra. We found a lot of real stories that gave a lot more depth to our film. It’s not just about the theft of Kathals, that’s just the text. There is a lot more happening that gives the film it’s subtext.

How much of it is fiction and how much of it is real?

Essentially, you can call the entire film because we have just taken the essence of that incident. That’s why we say that the film is based on true-ish events. We found a lot of things about the plot and the sub- plot during our research. For example, the romance between Mahima and Saurabh, Mahima’s character is the derivative of so many wonderful women cops we met in Bundelkhand during our writing research. The real incident happened in Delhi.

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On choosing his actors

We wrote the script without thinking much about who we are going to cast because we were thinking about the real people that we had met. When we finally wrote the script, the casting started taking a lot of shape in my head. The idea was to find actors that understood the text, what we are trying to say exactly here. And of course, to find actors that had an understanding of comic timing so it was a privilege to have Sanya Malhotra because she has been so instrumental in shaping the tone of the film. We have actors like Rajpal sir, Vijay Raaz sir, I’ve been a fan of them. So that’s been a complete privilege. All the credit goes to my casting directors; a lot of the actors in the film are upcoming actors, local actors from Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh.

On OTT opening doors for new actors and experienced ones too

It’s the greatest boom. More liberal outlook has entered the narrative which I am truly grateful for. Especially a platform like Netflix filled with liberal thinking and wide world-view oriented professionals and artists that is changing the narrative. There’s a lot more in young filmmakers like me, the efforts the writers put in. Overall, it’s been a fantastic change and we are just beginning, we shall be bringing stories from all over the countries.

On cinema changing

It’s wonderful. It’s a wave, a new wave. We are not putting projects ticking boxes all the time but we are trying to be braver here. We are trying to give the audience a new experience and not just stick to clichés. We are trying to start a new conversation which has been really important. Most of the people in all the countries are on their small screen now, they are all on their phones.

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