'Industry' creator Navjot Gulati on outsider’s guide to make it in Bollywood: Get up, work, network

Navjot Gulati Pic/Instagram

Writer-director Navjot Gulati's story is a Bollywood film waiting to be told. Not because it's never heard before. Because it's spoken in every nook and corner of the industry. The story of fall, rise and a hundred tries. The story of everyone in the movies, whether they make it big or not.

Not sure, if Bollywood would ever wake up to it, Gulati has gone ahead and told his side, with Amazon miniTV's latest series, Industry, a dramedy chronicling the struggles as well as the perseverance of a Bollywood writer named Aayush Varma (played by Gagan Arora). "I am not the only Aayush in Aaram Nagar," begins Gulati, who has created, co-written and directed the five-episode series.

A 15-year-long career and several misses later, Gulati has finally scored a win with Industry that has earned both critical acclaim and audience's praise for its unassuming peek into the behind-the-scenes working of Bollywood from a writer's perspective. "I have people sending me pictures of their first cheques and contracts. I am not used to all this. The show is about chronicles of my life fictionalised for dramatic effects. But the victory of the story is that everyone feels it's their story."

But what's unique to Gulati in the sea of people rounding up daily in the lanes of Aaram Nagar, a tiny neighbourhood next to Versova in Andheri and home to casting agencies and production houses, is that he is also described as the ‘original hustler of Versova'. "Somen Mishra (Creative development head, Dharma Productions) coined the term hustler for me. A lot of people thought he was insulting me, but I took it as a compliment. Even my Youtube channel and production company are called Versova Hustler." Mishra didn't exaggerate. In fact, he could use this moment in Gulati's childhood to substantiate his claim.

Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! was running housefull at Bareilly's single-screen theatre, Prabha. It had already been twice that six-year-old Gulati and his family had failed to get the tickets. In their third try, the youngest family member took it upon himself to make sure their visit didn't go in vain. "I lost it the third time. I somehow managed to get inside the theatre, to the manager's cabin and demanded that he gave us tickets. I told him that it wasn't cool that this was a film about family, and a family wasn't able to watch it. The guy actually bought my nonsense and gave us the tickets," he recalls. Then for the next three months, Gulati was the bestowed person to make everyone in the family watch Hum Aapke Hai Koun…! "It was said, ‘Yeh ticket laadega (He will bring you the tickets). The love affair with the movies started at that age."

What was also discovered was Gulati's ability to get things done, which is also in desi exchange referred to as jugaad. And it continues to date. "I don't believe in the concept of giving up. If I want to get something made, I will not stop till it happens."

Hustling has been his life's theme, even becoming the primary emotion of the first story he ever wrote. "It was about a guy I knew, who wanted to work at an international call centre. He was a Bihari. His English was impeccable but had a heavy mother tongue influence. So, he was unable to get a job for the longest time, but he never gave up. He would apply four times a week and get rejected. Somewhere, I was enamoured by this guy's tenacity to not give up and keep wanting the same thing. One day, he finally got a job at an international call centre and I was really happy. But came another hurdle. These call centres had a rule that they would only hire you if you live in the area where they provide cabs. And the office wasn't sending the cab to his place. So, he took a month and changed his entire address. By that time, that company shut down. And he never got a job. I don't know what happened to him. But he gave me an idea, which was that what if Lallan Kumar Chaubey changed his name to Larry Bose and became a cab driver and started observing these people going to call centres in order to improve his English to crack a call centre job," Gulati narrates.

Perseverance is often the only companion of an outsider, especially in Gulati's case, who by his own admission had nothing but only love for movies as his refuge. "There was a time in our life when we were financially broken as a family. My father was going through a tough time and my mother was running a boutique and my brother was doing a job in a call centre. And I was this 16-17 year old, trying to figure out life. I hated studying. The only refuge I had in life was movies. We didn't even have enough money to buy a film ticket. My mama (maternal uncle) used to sponsor our tickets and we could watch a film only when he would go to a theatre. So, the desire was to get rich enough to afford a film ticket. Everything else followed."

Also marked by striking self-awareness, Gulati dropped out of school after class eleven. "For almost five years from then, I did multiple things in Delhi. I had a consultancy for BPOs. I used to do embroidery work. I had a factory and I also worked at a call centre. I also worked as a sales manager at a bank. So, I learnt life. I wanted to enter movies but didn't have the courage to follow through."

Courage followed him via a reality show. "Boman Irani hosted this Bollywood quiz show, Bollywood Ka Boss. The only entrance exam I ever passed was for this show. They had selected around 100 people out of 10,000 applicants for 10 episodes." True to his journey marked by several falls, Gulati didn't win the show. Ironically, failures have always pushed him ahead. "During my elimination in the second round itself, I asked Boman Irani on air, ‘Sir, I am a writer. I want to come to Mumbai and tell stories. What do you think should I do next?' He said, ‘If you have a good story, people will find you even from as far as Alaska.' As per my lack of understanding of life, I thought he was inviting me to Mumbai when he was actually giving me a warning that ‘Boss, don't come. If it's in your destiny, they will get you from Alaska.'"

In 2009, the 22-year-old aspiring writer packed his bags to Mumbai, but not without his homework. "Even before coming to Mumbai, I knew the city better than other people because I was a film nut. I had Filmfare, Mayapuri on my desk more than my course books. I was so interested in all things films that I knew the business beforehand. I knew Andheri West is the place of opportunities."

The plan was simple. Find a job to sustain a living and stories to sell. "I worked in a call centre for three months. While working there, I managed to score a job at Cinevistaas. In the initial years, wherever I would go, I would find a story, make friends and try to have a good time while hating the jobs. I was a creative writer at Cinevistaas. I was in the development of shows but they didn't get made. So, I made no contribution there, just got paid. For another year, I worked for TV and realised it wouldn't pay my bills. There was also no gratification. I realised I don't have the talent for TV." The years didn't go to waste, though, as Gulati continued to write, not dwelling on rejection.

"I am never scared of people judging me because I already believe I have written a bad script. So, everything else is a bonus. I can write a script in 4 days, but I am not a brilliant writer. I have written 72 scripts till date."

In 2012 came his first writing break as he got hired for Running Shaadi, which was to star Taapsee Pannu and Amit Sadh. But destiny had a long wait planned for him. "We started writing in 2012, shot it in 2013 and it released in 2017. It was a frustrating time because I didn't know how good or bad I was. I couldn't sit at home waiting for it to get released. So, I made a short film in the meantime." Vikrant Massey and Kritika Kamra united for Gulati's directorial debut, Best Girlfriend. It could have been called ‘My best friends' as well, given his leads, big television stars then, didn't charge him a penny. "They had been my friends from before. I am gifted with people skills. When people talk to me, they fall in love with me," he remarks.

It would be amusing if his confession wasn't backed by visual proof. His latest work is marked by easily more than 20 cameos from industry insiders. Hansal Mehta, Abhishek Banerjee, Tarun Dudeja, Sumit Roy, Sumit Arora and Hardik Mehta to name a few. In all these years, when the writer-director struggled for a breakthrough, he made blockbuster friendships, bursting the myth that in Bollywood, relationships favour the winner. "If these people weren't part of the show, it wouldn't have felt half as real as it does. I don't have friends outside Bombay. They all feel happy and sad for me. They also correct me. In the show industry itself, there are many inputs that have come from people like Suhail Nayyar, Tarun Dudeja, Naveen Kasturia and Parijat Joshi. I have the ability and talent to write but my actual writing is done by my friends, the ones who read my scripts and give me feedback and inputs."

Interestingly, many of these friendships began as Gulati's work dates. That's another aspect of the filmmaker to marvel at. Quite early on in his journey, he realised work without network would not cut it in an industry, which hands out no invites. You have to gatecrash. "I learnt a lot from Vikram Jai Singh," Gulati refers to Farhan Akhtar's character from Luck By Chance, which the filmmaker shares was his guide to the film industry. "That film was my window into how people work here. A part of the credit of why I am here goes to Zoya Akhtar. She told an outsider how things work in the industry. I knew from the beginning that nobody is is going to call me. I have to call them. I have to create ways of breaking into the system because I was up against something, which is unprofessional and random. I had to be inventive."

So, Gulati's formula was message and meet. "It's like dating. My dating used to be with directors, producers, writers. I must have done not less than 5000 meetings. Meet five people every day. Which means 30 people in a week. 120 people in a month. If you do that consistently, you will get work. I have met everyone as a struggling writer. I would text them, ‘Hi, I know you have worked on so and so. You will become a director in the future and you will need a script for it. This is where I come in. I can write.' I have also written to people, saying, 'You have made a terrible film. But now I am in your life, I will make it better.' Then I meet them and become friends with them. This became a means of knowing people."

Network might have brought work to him, but the latter was yet to become friend with him. Gulati directed a short, a music video and an episode of a series post Running Shaadi, all missable. In 2020, came his feature directorial debut Jai Mummy Di, also his second film as a writer. It flopped. "It was a terrible film."

The box office failure brought in much-needed introspection. About what he wanted to make and how to make it better. "I am a really bad writer, but I am aware how to make it better. That's why I am able to write so much. I spent five years of my life trying to make a bad film. So, I definitely know if I make something good, how it is. My entire learning from my career till pandemic is that if I have to tell a story, it has to be so rich that it's worth dying otherwise I don't want to tell."

In this resolve has been born, what Gulati calls, his trilogy of sorts. Of which Industry is the first part. "I know I haven't made a Mirzapur or Aspirants or Panchayat that people swear by. But I believe I have made something that will be remembered in cluster of people for a long time."

The next two are courtroom drama Pooja Meri Jaan with Mrunal Thakur and Huma Qureshi, and family comedy Badtameez Gill starring Vaani Kapoor and Aparshakti Khurrana. "Badtameez Gill was first supposed to be a story of two brothers, but no one wanted to make it. I changed it to brother-sister and set in London because I wanted to travel to the city. And I couldn't travel without purpose," he grins.

What makes this new chapter even more special for Gulati is that while one project had most of his friends guest-starring in it, Pooja Meri Jaan has another close friend backing it. "Amar Kaushik is a very old friend. I remember I had written a simple text to Amar Kaushik even before Stree happened. ‘Writer hun, Milan chahta hun (I am a writer. I want to meet you.' He was an AD then. He made a film for me after Jai Mummy Di because I had taken a promise from him, saying, ‘My film Jai Mummy Di is going to flop. You have to make my next.' He fulfilled the promise and made Pooja Meri Jaan. Because I have always been honest and helpful, a lot of people wanted to be around. I have helped without expecting anything in return. All the hit directors in the last 10 years are my friends. It's for a reason. I have nurtured them and they are far more successful than me."

The six-year-old boy in him smiles ear to ear. He, who wanted to afford a ticket to watch a film, is rich enough to make films happen. For himself and others. "The other day, I met a big director, who is an old friend and he loves the show and he wanted to meet me. "The meeting ended with me getting him a meeting with a big producer, who was looking for a director."