Hi, Sandhya. Thank you so much for talking to me today!
You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
Congratulations on Santosh. What’s it been like seeing the response to the movie?
We haven’t released in India yet, but in all the other places we have released it has been really, really fantastic. And we’re releasing on Friday in the UK. So that’s sort of extra special because it’s it’s home turf.
How did the idea for the film come to you? It’s been roughly in development since 2016, is that right?
2016 was actually writing the script, but the idea was even there before that. I actually went to the lab, Sundance Lab with it in 2016. But it actually started as as a documentary. I wanted to make something about violence against women, and I was in India, working with NGOs dealing with these issues. But I was finding it hard to make it work as a doc because it was really difficult to just point the camera at the violence and show it, and I felt I wasn’t able to get inside it or dissect it or ask questions about it.
I felt that I had to sort of hang that project up and wait. Then a few years later, which was actually in 2012, I saw a photograph, or maybe I think it was 2013. Yeah. Coming out of the horrible gang rape case on the bus in Delhi, the Nirbhaya case. I saw a photograph of a female cop in India facing female protesters, very angry. Um, and she had a very interesting expression on her face, and I just knew that it was about her [who] I was making the film, and that started a whole journey into fiction and all sorts of things.
It intersected somewhat with your work, The Field, that came out in 2018. How did both pieces of work play off each other, or not at all?
Well, I’d already written the script when I went to make The Field. And everyone was saying, you know, “actually you could just go and make the feature” because the funding was sort of almost there. And I had no idea whether I can make a film, a fiction film or whether… you know… I know nothing. So I need[ed] to try some stuff out.
I didn’t necessarily take the most, savvy route, which may have been to make a proof of concept of the long, because I didn’t feel that there was anything that I could take out of there that worked in the short form. You know, I love short form, I love short stories, and I and I’d written The Field, and I thought it was very good in the form for a short, like, I really thought it worked as a short form. So then I just took the time out and and went and tried to learn a little bit about about that and shot a film at 50 degrees in Haryana in India. And, you know, I just said “I will never shoot at 50 degrees again”. So this time I shot it like 40 or 45 instead.
You mentioned thinking about it from a documentary perspective. And something I said to Shahana was that when you watch it, it it feels so true to life that it almost does feel like a documentary. With both Santosh and with The Field, there is that sense that you’re allowing these women to be and to be present, and you can see that in the way that you set up the shots and, and the space that allows their reactions to actually live.
How much of that is influenced by your documentary filmmaking, and how much of that has just come to you as you’ve gone [on]?
Well, I think the documentary is always an interesting starting point for me, and it’s a starting point in both films, you know, so, you know, this has a documentary feel. But what’s interesting about Santosh is that it’s a thriller with a documentary feel, and I’m happy to lean into the genre at certain points in the film or like in The Field, to elevate into a very different world, for one strand of that story.
So for me, it’s a starting point, and most of it is not about… you know, sometimes when when fiction wants to appropriate documentary, it goes with a shaky camera or something like that. But for documentary makers who are always trying to hold the camera still, basically we don’t tend to do that.
And I think for me, it’s it’s all about research and details and levels and levels of detail and having a good bullshit detector about what feels true and what doesn’t feel true.
That’s that’s kind of how I respond on set to most things, if it feels true or not.
It comes across very beautifully in – I would actually say – probably the most harrowing scenes, some of the most difficult scenes in the film. Something that I found so interesting about it was given the subject matter, you treat it with such delicate empathy. It is so [multi]-faceted in the way that we see Santosh react to these things.
How important was that to you to make it a film where… I think there are moments where you do see Santosh and you go, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do?” But also, “Yeah, I totally understand that.”
How important was it to show all of [that]? The dark and the light of of all of it.
Well, it’s always about that for me. It’s always about… I think it’s been interesting because some of the responses I’ve had, especially from women about the film, has been that it’s incredibly hard and also soft.
And that’s like a compliment for me because it’s really… really what I want to do is to always keep humanity and empathy for everybody in the film. Not to ever do anything to shock for the sake of it, but to try to be true.
For us to be able to watch a character and not judge them, but be with them if you set them in in a very complex moral playground, which is where Santosh finds herself as from the first scene that she’s at the police. Then I think we’ve understood and we’ve sort of immersed ourselves in that world well enough to understand what goes in that world.
So when she does behave in a way which feels difficult, maybe there is some understanding from the viewer’s perspective as well, you know.
Absolutely. If I can touch on Santosh and Sharma and their relationship in the movie, which is just delicious to watch and to see it evolve: how did inspiration for their relationship start off and how did that develop over time?
Well, I always knew I wanted to make a mentor-mentee relationship in a film. I wanted to do that. And I thought, “well, okay, let’s have it between women”. Um, And one thing I knew is that Sharma was probably the first woman in Santosh’s life to ever really praise her for being smart and bright and and encourage her and say, “you can absolutely do this. You’ve got this.”
I thought that’s a very important thing to have a woman like that come into her life at this stage of her life, at this particular moment. But I didn’t want to make anything too happy-clappy in terms of female solidarity either, because it felt too easy.
You know, I’m always cautious not to, like, bore myself when I’m writing a script or an idea, you know? Look at the ladies against the against the men. Because, I mean, the whole tapestry of the film is so complex that if I make that so simple, it doesn’t feel correct, it doesn’t fit. So I just wanted to show the lights and the darks of that.
And I think that Sharma is a character herself… sort of is that way because she’s kind of unknowable. And we’re not entirely sure what she believes in in the film, even despite, you know, even when she expresses them directly… whether she believes her own rhetoric or not is also a question. So she’s kind of unknowable.
And I thought, well, let’s discover her through Santosh’s eyes and see what we think.
How then did that evolve into the process of finding both actors that fit those roles well?
I knew with Shahana when I met her at the casting, which was quite late in the process, actually: I knew that I wanted… you know, the Santosh I had written was never sort of very innocent. She was never like that. She was a woman who had a certain intelligence and survival to her and also had a little ambition. She’s independent thinking, she married for love.
So I was just curious about making sure that I felt that ambition and that slight resistance to tradition in her, but not in an overt way, so I wanted to set that up lightly.
And then Sharma, I just wanted her to not be an archetype of a of a matriarch. I wanted her to feel human and vulnerable and and to feel like an ordinary woman who would work in that position.
Then I did a character test, a chemistry test with both of them. And I was just… I did that silent sort of movement session with them both, and I was absolutely sure that they were the right couple.
I was surprised, but also not surprised to find out that this was the first Hindi language submission that had ever been made by the UK to the Oscars, which, I mean, it feels like it’s about time. Did you see that coming? What did that feel like to know that that it was your movie being chosen?
Oh well, so great. It’s so great because everything depends about what’s on that year and what else is out there. That’s that determines sort of, the fate of your film, really. So I felt very, very lucky that that we were there, but it wasn’t the same year as The Zone of Interest! Right.
It meant a lot that it’s a it’s a Hindi film as well, for Britain to put that forward. I also felt I had India rooting for me and England rooting for me as well.
How much do you feel that your own upbringing in England has influenced even picking Santosh as as a subject matter, how it’s maybe giving you license (or maybe not) to tell the stories that you want to tell?
I mean, I suppose it’s just about a drive to have a deeper relationship to India. And that drive comes from not being in India, probably [and] you know, my father, having always had such a deep relationship and a yearning and a love for his motherland that I grew up with very, very strongly.
So for me, going back to India a lot, exploring with my camera, using filmmaking as a way to go deeper in my relationship, and learn things and explore is is I think will always be important to me.
Do you see yourself going back to documentary making any time soon or do you think scripted is, is a way forward for you now?
I think as someone… because archive is my huge love and that’s where I started, [if] someone were to come with to me with some, like, fantastic archive and say, “do you want to make a feature doc out of this archive?”
Then I would be very excited because archive is what I love. But I’ve also, with this film, really enjoyed that vision. The vision of a fiction filmmaker and all the different departments and all the different the oversight over everything, of every aspect of that story and all its different forms and collaborating and with such brilliant people and using their expertise. And that’s been a joy, because doc making could sometimes be a little lonely.
When I’ve been talking to other people about the film, something that has struck them and that I’ve conveyed, [is] how it really sheds light on a reality that exists for a lot of Indian women and by extension, a lot of South Asian women, where sometimes in mass media they can be portrayed as quite stereotypical or… never multifaceted.
How much do you think that has changed over the years for Indian women in in mainstream media?
I don’t know if I consume enough mainstream media to answer that, to be honest. I live a slightly hermit life. I do think that part of my motivations and making Santosh was – and also The Field actually – sometimes you look at a woman from South Asia with a certain sort of sense of, “oh dear, look, her situations are terrible. She’s a widow. Like, what is she going to do?” Or like, “look at this agricultural labourer in the field.”
Like, life seems so impossible for her if you look at it with a certain gaze. But actually, having met so many women in so many situations in villages or towns without money, with dire circumstances… actually the level of negotiating obstacles, maneuvering intelligently, playing chess in order to get the maximum for them and their families, and just the intelligence with which women survive and actually thrive, even in very difficult circumstances… [that] was part of the reason why I wanted to make the film and what formed Santosh.
Do you have any particular hopes for the kind of conversations or receptions that you hope Santosh will bring as it continues to roll out in more territories?
What I think I’m happy about with this film is that when you go and see it in the cinema, you can sit and have a drink afterwards, and there is a lot to discuss about this film: whether you agree, whether you argue with your friends or not, I think it opens up so many conversations, and that’s precisely what I wanted.
I wanted a film that opened up conversations and that left a lot to think about. You know, [whether] you like it or don’t like it, whether you agree with this or not. There’s a lot to talk about.
And for me, that is sort of the joy of cinema and international cinema in particular, that you can go and it can talk about some very… it’s entertaining, but it’s talking about some very strong things as well.
I’d love to see it in outreach and go to universities and be part of bigger conversations as well. But mainly I want people to be moved, and I think that’s what… I hope that’s what the film does.