Do you have an item number?

Illustration/Uday Mohite

So we finished our film Pune Highway - Bugs Bhargava Krishna and I - an independent offering, a labour of love, based on a play I wrote 20 years ago.

The production travelled to many foreign lands, and we would sit in bistros and bars, looking out at windmills, the water, Waterloo Bridge, Washington Memorial, and ponder the future. Bugs who also acted in the play would say, "Buddy, we should make Pune Highway into a small budget film." And I stalled, content to be in the theatre. But he persisted, whispering in my ear, "I am your film conscience, fight me all you want, but it is inevitable you will make your first feature, and then your second…"

"Film bana lo," Anurag Kashyap told me at one of our earlier shows, back in 2005. Bugs persisted for 20 years. By now, he would have even made two of his own films.

Cut to 2022, as the pandemic spread its tentacles. Its one good deed was it guaranteed that content became king, people stayed home, and watched cinema of all kinds. Bugs said to me, "Now's the time to make Pune Highway, the film, let's write it… we'll open up the play, not an expensive film, but an expansive one." We jumped into my first screenplay, we co-wrote for two months, on Final Draft, brainstorming back and forth on Facetime. We then shot for 40 gruelling days, between Bandra and Bhor, edited four months. We realised that your writer's hat differs wildly from your director's hat, which rests eventually with your own inner editor. You need to be ruthless - you could have shot a two-minute scene for two back breaking days, to find it has no place in your final product.

"When will your film be released?" was the question I was asked. Paul Anderson, cult film director, once famously said, "Forty per cent of filmmaking is the actual making of the film" - the rest he suggested was the selling, negotiating with the studios, the suits having their say, streaming vs cinema, putting on your producer's hat, the business end of the project.

"Who are your stars?" was the next question, "We don't have Shah Rukh, we have Sarbh, Jim Sarbh. We don't have Amitabh, instead, we have Amit Sadh."

"Hmm good actors."

And the third question - "Do you have an item number?"

The question Bugs and I asked of each other - is the gap between intelligent cinema and a "dhamaal Bollywood picture" a catchy song? Clinton Cerejo, our music composer, agreed: "Your film is also set in Karad, right, let's do a Marathi-Hindi number." And so, we have a Sunidhi Chauhan song.

"Picture chalegi, theatre mein?" one distributor asked us. "Isn't it an OTT film?"

Another said, "Boss, there's no such thing, as an OTT film, there's good cinema and bad cinema."

But that's March 2025, that's another chapter, in darkened auditoria we will be watched over popcorn… as we launch in 100 cinemas.

The audiences will smell authenticity, they will pick holes in your script, by their coughing, and restless shifting and their shifting their attention away from the big screen to their small blue screens. You can't fool audiences. They want good content, in fact, they demand it.

Got to be tight, got to be taut, got to be tense. Tell them your story gradually, be one step ahead of your audience, don't spoon feed them, but surprise them.

But in the present, we are a week away from our premiere, on the red carpet, at IFFI, Goa, Asia's largest film festival - we will unearth our film exactly two years from the first day we began shooting.

I'm also old school, as is Bugs Bhargava Krishna, gotta see your film big, on a large screen, larger than life, where you can hear every tiny water drop from a tap, you can hear the lap of waves - the mesmerising magic of 70 mm.

Also there's something amazing about premiering your film at a film festival, it sets the tone.

One thing is for sure - as I walk with Bugs towards my first Gala opening, on my first red carpet, there's nothing iffy about IFFI.

Rahul daCunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright, photographer and traveller. Reach him at rahul.dacunha@mid-day.com