From taking smoke breaks together to finishing each others’ sentences, the camaraderie among filmmakers Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti, Nitya Mehra and Alankrita Shrivastava is evident. As they sit down for a quick tête-à-tête at a suburban Mumbai hotel, they unanimously inform me that the best part of working on their first web series, Made in Heaven , was the opportunity to collaborate with friends.
The show chronicles the lives of Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala) and Karan (Arjun Mathur), two wedding planners in Delhi, and features an ensemble cast that includes, Jim Sarbh, Shashank Arora, Kalki Koechlin and Shivani Raghuvanshi. After two years in the making, the nine-episode drama is ready for streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Edited excerpts from the interview…
Three writers, four directors and a showrunner. Too many cooks spoil the broth?
Zoya: That you will have to tell us.
Alankrita: We don’t think it spoiled the broth. We enjoyed cooking.
Nitya: Reema and Zoya came up with the idea and got Alankrita as a writer. Since each episode is a different wedding, we could work with multiple directors, so Zoya directed the first two. I did three and Alankrita did the last two and we have a director called Prashant Nair. We did an actors workshop and once they got the sur [tone] of the characters, it’s easy and we had the same crew, and I was there throughout the shoot. In terms of collaboration, we were all on the same page.
A series like this depend heavily on observations, where there are stereotypes of how people behave at weddings. How do you then dismantle clichés?
Reema: That happens at the writing stage. There’s a layer that’s apparent which is the story of two wedding planners and it is episodic stories but all of it goes towards delving into the Indian society.
Zoya: It’s all about the writing. People keep asking us, how do change things from caricature. I think there are good and bad writers. It’s your gaze on it. I find that write everything they caricature everything from sexuality, women, weddings, physical disability or even men and the concept of masculinity.
So are lived experiences important? In this case a wedding…
Alankrita: I don’t think that is as important as having empathy.
Reema: You know with Dil Dhadakne Do I have never been on a cruise, in my life. Nitya was that person for us.
Zoya: You’ve been through a billion weddings, it’s part of your DNA.
Zoya and Reema, we see you exploring the lives of rich Delhi elites again after Dil Dhadakne Do . What made you pick this demography?
Zoya: When you are a wedding planner in a space like Delhi you obviously want to hit it big. You want to play weddings for people with money. So as characters that’s where you want to go anyway. Having said that there are all degrees of weddings through the season, [in] the [wedding] agency [in the show] there are people from different strata. But there is a certain aspiration to the big fat wedding.
Alankrita: I think that series has an inbuilt subtext of the critique of class…
Nitya: Initially when we met, we picked this one theme of insiders and outsiders. I think our society is divided into that. Tara tries to crawl into that world but then wonders if it’s really worth it.
That sense of being an outsider also comes from the inclusion of a queer character. Has representation changed since Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. (2007) , which also had a gay character?
Reema: It has changed marginally. There’s room for a lot more. Obviously, the biggest change being legislation. Things are not going to change overnight but the process of de-stigmatisation has begun. In Made in Heaven specifically, we thought this had a very valid space in a discussion about love, marriage and relationship.
Zoya: Because you are living in a country and your job is to plan weddings. But it’s something you can never have and it is no fault of yours.
Is sexuality more than a source of conflict in the show?
Zoya: Absolutely. The classic argument against women representation has been that they are the object of desire or only exist in relation to a man. So now if you’re going to take sexual orientation, you can’t make it just about that. They are people who have worlds that come with them. Who they choose to date cannot define them.
Reema: What we were trying to do, is what happens to a person when you are stigmatised like that. It has an effect, however thick-skinned you are.
Made in Heaven is the first web series for all of you. Did you have reference points?
Zoya: You know certain shows and there have central characters and the background keeps changing. We’ve seen that before. But do we have a reference point? No.
Nitya: Also because Reema and Zoya usually end up writing big ensemble films.
Zoya: And we usually end up overwriting as well.
Nitya: So shows really lend themselves to ensemble stories.
Are you conscious of your audience being largely a millennial one?
Zoya: I’m more aware of that when I’m doing a feature, and I know my audience. But in this medium, you don’t really know who is watching. They never give you the data and you’re never going to know. It gives you a certain sense of freedom.
Nitya: It’s also open to a global audience.
Reema: There is a certain amount of self-censorship when you are conscious of your target audience, which in this case that didn’t come up for me personally. I wasn’t censoring myself.
