After entertaining the audience on the big screen, Apoorva Lakhia will continue to do so on the OTT platform. The director’s debut web series Crackdown, an espionage action drama, will stream on Viacom18’s subscription-based streaming offering, Voot Select. During the launch of the series in Mumbai, Apoorva said that Suresh Nair and Chintan Gandhi had approached him with the script, which was ‘really good’.
The series stars Saqib Saleem, Iqbal Khan, Waluscha De Sousa, Shriya Pilgaonkar and others. “We got into the drawing board who we wanted. We have got really interesting cast and that makes the show interesting because you haven’t seen these kind of people together,” said Apoorva, when we caught up with him. “We had a very good star cast in their own space, some experienced and some inexperienced,” he added.
An espionage action drama is most enjoyed on the big screen. Did he adapt it in a way so that people can enjoy it on their mobile screen too? “Honestly, I did not think that way because I have shot the entire thing like a movie. I do not know any other way to shoot because the equipment, actors and shot taking is very much the same. The only difference is that you, along with the actors, have to be extremely well prepared because you do not have the time to muck around on the set. So, I requested them to do script reading so they were well prepared, we did rehearsals, the action scenes were choreographed, so on the set, we went and shot,” he said.
The biggest challenge for him was to make two-and-a-half movies in the period of one. “I have made films like Shootout at Lokhandwala and others, which I have shot in 55 days. Shooting this series with 123 characters in the same amount of time was a task,” he said.
When it comes to making projects for the web, the budget is still very less. Apoorva too had to face this challenge. “People are still experimenting and I really had to fight for the budget. It was impossible for me to shoot it in that kind of a budget. Thankfully, they understood my point,” he said, adding, “That said, as a creative person, nothing is enough. When you are doing an action scene, instead of one car, you want five. You have to control that and see what is practical.”
For a content creator, the OTT platform is an exciting medium because there’s ‘no censorship’. However, Apoorva said that he didn’t take any kind of liberty while making the series. “There is no sex or anything of that sort. I make pretty clean films. My mom is pretty particular about the kind of cinema I make because I come from an extremely conservative Gujarati family. I get phone calls if the dialogues are not appropriate or are disrespectful towards women,” he said.
The only problem he had with the Censor Board in the past was when it asked him to curb violence. “For the Censor Board, violence means blood and there’s hardly any blood in this series,” he added.
The filmmaker believes that for cinema to be well received on any platform the writing has to be good. “I do understand that it’s a star based industry but if the writing is not good, then the product is not good enough and it doesn’t matter how big the actor is. On the web space too, the writing has to be good because there is so much content around. You have to keep the viewers hooked with your writing,” he said, adding, “Also, while making a web series, you have to think about how to end your series so that people will come back for the second season. The ending is very important and a lot of thought needs to go into it.”
Apoorva has directed films inspired by real life and fiction. When asked how he chooses the stories, he said, “Anyway, I am a lazy director and I make one movie every three-and-a-half years. I do not worry whether they will do well or not, as long as someone believes in them and agrees to invest in my talent. The reason I have done more real-life drama is because I find it more exciting to research,” said the director who has directed films like Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost, Ek Ajnabee, Mission Istaanbul, Zanjeer and Haseena Parkar.
He likes grey characters because everyone is grey. “If someone tells you that one is all white or black, it’s not possible,” said the director before signing off.