Asur 2 director Oni Sen: It’s not difficult not to hurt people while depicting parts of Indian mythology – Exclusive | Hindi Movie News
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In an exclusive conversation with ETimes, Oni spoke candidly about the characters of Asur 2, challenges of directing a web series and how Indian mythology can effectively be merged into the world of science and technology.
How do you feel about the response that you are getting for Asur 2?
I think there are many things that we feel as a team. We are very, very happy, very excited that so much of love and support has come our way. A lot of people have watched it and we are very grateful to get this amount of support. And the thing is that, we all know that season 2 is always a tricky one, especially when season 2 becomes popular. So, we were all a little apprehensive in spite of doing all our best. When the reports started coming in and when people started sending us their responses and the numbers we saw – the number of people who were watching it, it was fantastic. I think we can only be grateful and thankful for it.
What was the first thing that came to your mind when the story of Asur came to you?
Before I read the story of Asur, Gaurav Shukla had told me about it. And the thing is, I was honestly slightly apprehensive before reading it because Indian mythology is always a tricky one. You are always walking on thin ice. You can go left or right on that. And also, all the kinds of work that I do and I like doing are essentially human stories. But when I read it, there’s something which really, really got me in the story because I really liked the human connection in the story. And I knew that it would allow me to explore a lot of human minds and dynamics. The mythology part was so deeply entwined into the narrative. And this is what I thought made the story extremely special to me. And that’s when we started working on it. Going back to what really attracted me was not only the mythology part, but to talk about a bunch of characters who are struggling with themselves and their entire ups and downs. And that became even bigger in season 2.
Did it also help in better engagement with the audience because they could relate to those characters?
Yes, because if you see any film that you read or you watch, the narrative, just the narrative, how exciting or intriguing or captivating it may be, it stays with you for a little while, unless the human story connects with you. So that’s why I feel that we have, especially when we’re doing season 1 and of course from there onwards when we’re doing season 2, tried very hard to make sure that the human stories are as etched out as we can. And there’s a feeling, it’s not just watching. As a viewer you feel with the characters and go on a journey with those characters.
You also need strong actors who can emote and do justice to the characters. So how did you come to cast Arshad Warsi, Barun Sobti, Ridhi Dogra and other characters including Shubh in this?
The casting was done in two parts. I’m talking about season 1. Arshad and Barun were actually cast before I came into the project. I had not worked with either of them before. Arshad’s work, we are all very familiar with and we appreciate his work a lot. And Barun’s work I hadn’t seen much because he used to do a lot of work in television and I hadn’t watched those. So normally what I do is that each of these characters in my story, I write a lot about them in terms of what they’re feeling, what they’re doing, what their mannerisms are, how they portray themselves. And then I spoke to both Arshad and Barun. It was actually very, very easy because they were both extremely committed and very, very invested. So, for instance, with Barun, who plays Nikhil’s character, there was this entire thing of him talking almost a thousand words a second. Sometimes his mind starts thinking more before his mouth can finish speaking. And there’s a certain energy in his eyes and his mind. That’s why he can think of these amazing things. So that nervous body language, that slightly unkempt professorial look to him, everything that we had planned, worked and executed together. And they had done it beautifully.
And Arshad being an absolute other polarity of where it’s a lot more measured, but you can see, can feel that there is not a sense of lightness in him. There is a lot of darkness in him and a lot of angst in him. And he’s very brooding as a character. He flares up once in a while. So the entire demeanor, body language, everything we had sort of discussed, worked. And Arshad was amazing following that through and adding more to it as we progressed shooting.
Similarly with Ridhi (Dogra), Anupriya (Goenka) and Amey (Wagh). They were all handpicked and cast, especially based on the character graphs that I had written. And it was shared with the casting team and for season one.
The tough one was always Shubh. Because I’m not talking about Shubh in season one. There are two Shubhs in season one, actually. One was like a 15-year-old and the other one was about 10-year-old. And the older one was Vishesh Bansal. And both were amazing. Now for Shubh also, I had planned out what he will be like. Because at one level, it’s written in the story and in the screenplay that Shubh is this boy. You know, this is what he feels, believes. And this is what he does. But how? It’s a tough one. How do we visualise Shubh? And for that, I always ask myself, ‘What does Shubh feel? What does Shubh feel when he does something? What does Shubh feel at any given point?’ And that gives a lot of answers. Shubh is somebody who creates a huge amount of storms and almost like a war outside. But, inside him, there’s a stillness. And that is why he can have so many thoughts which are going in his head. So that’s something which he followed in our casting as well. For instance, If you see Shubh’s eyes, it hardly ever moves. His tonality, it hardly ever wavers. Because, whenever we talk, there are intonations, like sometimes we pause, sometimes we give a little stress on something, because I want you to feel for me. Shubh has no such thing. There is a certain calmness in him through which he talks, which is what makes him Shubh. But at the same time, through this entire stillness, he’s actually creating mayhem all around. So, there’s a contrast. This contrast is something which I wanted to get in this character. And he found it in Vishesh, and it worked beautifully.
Similarly, when we were doing season two, where you had to get an older Shubh, as in the current day Shubh, we had to follow a similar route to find this character as well, so that it does a continuity in the look and feel. These are all fun things that we did.
How difficult was it to blend the mythology into the modern times and to make it believable to the audience?
So here is where a lot of the writing that came in. Gaurav and his writing team worked towards the entire narrative, and the research of it. They made sure that the mythological aspects, and the narrative are seamlessly merging in. If you’re talking about, say, a story of Rudraksh, there are two parts to it. One is the story of Rudraksh, where they made sure it is absolutely authentic by getting it from a few sources so that it’s all absolutely correct. Now comes the point that, in our narrative, whatever’s happening, whether Shubh is killing people, or whatever is happening, how is this Rudraksh story seamlessly connected to it so that nobody ever questions. And that was done very beautifully, and that made it easier for us to stage it with conviction. Because if you don’t have conviction in this, then the believability goes away, then it doesn’t work at all. And there are a few things we had followed which helped us to get technology in. For instance, after a bit of research, in some of the places, it was repeatedly written that in future, Kali’s weapon would be technology. Because if you see Indian mythology, and even other mythologies in other parts of the world, there is a lot of technology – whether it’s flying carriers, these arrows which become thousand warheads, and there are many things like that. Therefore, it was very easy to convert that into our current technology, which is artificial intelligence, through which people try to control minds. Because we all know that the future wars will not be fought with guns and tanks anymore. It will be fought with various other things, and most important will be mind control. So, that is what Shubh is getting towards, and this is what is so relevant nowadays. All of us are very wary of technology nowadays, are we being spied on all the time, are we being heard all the time, do we have any privacy?
And besides that, the final challenge was that, all these things are very, very attractive, very exciting to watch, but how do we keep the human story going? Because that has been a challenge, which went from the writing level to the shooting direction to the editing level. So we have constantly rediscovered things and changed it to get it to the final shape, to balance it out.
Was it challenging to get all the actors and crew to shoot at various places during Covid?
Yes, it was challenging because I think each one of us was trying to figure out how to live that time. And so what happened was, even though supposedly the darkest time was over and we were in the second wave getting over, we were still unsure. There’s something which we didn’t know – how we will get it and how we will not get it. But we had to be very, very careful. So therefore, working at a pace, in a way we used to work earlier, was not the case. So it was very difficult. A lot of new things to get used to. For instance, in scenes where there were a lot of junior artists. So there were scenes in say Banaras where there were 400 junior artists. So we all had to start four hours before our call time. I mean, some teams had to start at some three in the morning. And so for each one of them, there was an RT–PCR I had done, then I made sure that they all had masks. There were these special teams who would roam around to make sure that all precautions were taken.
Right after things opened up, a lot of people had called their production earlier. Everybody started working again. So the actors were overbooked with their older projects as well. So getting dates of various actors together was getting difficult, not just for us. I’m sure it was difficult for all the people who were shooting at that time. So things were getting delayed. Small practical issues like say one actor for our show had slightly longer hair. For an older one, I had shorter hair. Now if they’re doing patchwork, how do you work around it? Both are important. So there were a lot of things that we were trying to navigate through which are not necessarily about cinema. But we managed to bypass all that.
Are you also working on Asur 3?
Yes, the third season, Gaurav and I have sort of discussed that. Gaurav told me that he will let me know once he has an idea because unless we have a fantastic idea there is no point starting on that. Because each of these takes two years of your life. So it has to be a really fantastic idea. So once Gaurav thinks of something, he will let me know. But as of now, we haven’t discussed it yet.
Adipurush has taken a lot of beating due to its misrepresentation of mythology. As a filmmaker, how much creative liberty can you take while touching upon sensitive subjects?
Firstly, I haven’t watched Adipurush. So I really don’t know what to comment on it. However, if you ask about a bigger picture of Indian mythology, there is one thing I believe in – that there is a difference between mythology and documented history. So, documented history also is open to interpretation but not as much as mythology in our country. And also, our mythology somewhere connects to religion as well. Therefore, anybody who does work on Indian mythology should be ready for some kind of response, not always positive. I think that is a given. It can go this way or that way. But at the same time, I always feel that if you are very honest with your story and use or depict parts of mythology, which is very important to your story and nothing else, not for the fun of it or not for the sensational part of it, I think it should be okay. This is what I keep saying that it’s not difficult not to hurt people. So if you sit and think that you have written a script which has some kind of supposedly controversial thing to it, if you think it through, the script will tell you that these are things you can do without because it might unnecessarily create controversy. And controversy is not your story. Then you are being a disservice to the cinema that you are making. Whatever your story is, the other part of the controversy is actually taking away from it. That’s not what you should be wanting. So you can expand a little. A lot of it is common sense, actually.
What do you think about the OTT censorship?
Whether, when and how and what kind of censorship it is, a lot of it is out of my syllabus. Therefore, I won’t really comment on that. However, I think that we ourselves can do a lot of censorship. What I mean by that is, again, going to common sense, not putting in things in a story. Because every story demands and needs something. But a lot of times, we put in things to make it sensational. And that is where, if we ourselves decide that this is what our story needs, and this is not what our story needs, I think that censorship can take care of a lot of things right at the beginning. So, yeah, I think self-censorship is very important. Which is what we have tried to do in Asur as well. Because if you see, there is nothing untoward which has been used.
What kind of stories are you looking for in the future that you want to tell?
Well, my favourite thing is stories that deal with the human mind. So, everything that I have done till now, whether in advertising films, or in my documentary feature, or in the OTT series, the series that I have worked on, they have all been different from each other. But what binds them together is, they are all stories of the human mind. And, and this is what fascinates me. How do we tell stories about human beings? How do we go through a journey with a human being? And this is the most exciting thing in this world – mind. So, what I am working on after this, there are three projects, and they actually have various things in it. There is some drama, there is romance, some are light-hearted, but they are all actually human stories. All three are being developed, and then we are pitching it right now.
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