Smita Singh: 'Unlike Hollywood, screenwriting here has always been director-led'

Hindustan Times

4 days ago

What was your childhood like? Screenwriter Smita Singh (Courtesy the subject)
My father is from Madhya Pradesh, and my mother has roots in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. My father was in the army, so I have been all over during my childhood. Growing up in the 1980s with an army background meant visiting militarized zones and travelling with people who were carrying AK-47s and guns all the time. Punjab and Kashmir are where I spent most of my childhood. As a child, I did a lot of reading and watched a lot of movies.
Why and when did you think of becoming a writer?
Growing up in an army unit meant that my sister and I did not go out and interact with other people much. Everyone is from a different age group and different backgrounds. Some don't have their families along. So, it was a pretty solitary childhood which created a lot of time and space for reading. Also, being articulate, being able to express myself in words, became a priority for me.
I thought of getting into FTII, but it was too much – I didn't know how to do it. So, I finished my graduation from MP, which was my father's last posting, and then took up a Mass Communications course in Delhi, which I did not even finish. I did marketing jobs, back-end hotel jobs, sales – for a while, I was lost in Delhi. Then I got this job of transcribing interviews for Doordarshan, where I spent long hours going through interviews. Then I worked with Midi Tech, where we used to work on documentaries for National Geographic and Discovery. At this time, I was working in non-fiction, but I found that there were scripts online. I spent hours reading thousands of scripts, and that's when I thought this was something I wanted to do. I wanted to write for films. Then, much later in life, in 2012, I went to FTII.
How did Mumbai happen?
In 2006, I got married and moved to Bangalore. It was difficult to work there because I didn't know the language. So, from 2009 to 2012, I stopped working, and all I did was watch films. I turned my house into a mini film library. I would watch even the very obscure films from all over the world. I watched films and read a lot of scripts. In 2012, I felt ready to go to FTII, and I enrolled there. It was at FTII, where I developed the script for what eventually became Raat Akeli Hai. So, Tulsea, a talent management firm, came there for Campus Recruitment. Chaitanya (Hegde), who heads Tulsea, read the script and really liked it, and told me that Tulsea would like to represent me. That, for me, was a big step because I thought, now I know somebody who can introduce me to the industry. And they did it wonderfully. When I came to Bombay in 2014, Tulsea introduced me to lovely people like Shakun (Batra) and Kannu Behl. I also did a writing gig for Kannu. He discusses a lot, we talk a lot, sometimes the stories don't go anywhere, but I had a lovely time working with him. Then I also developed something with Gattu (Abhishek Kapoor). But then, about a year in, I felt that I didn't have the patience for it. I feel that I can't be someone's typist, you know. I can't be sitting there, writing down what someone is thinking. And I am pretty sure that people who worked with me realized that as well. But the writing gigs I did in my first year in Bombay did not really work out, and I got bored. Around that time, Vikram Motwayne read Raat Akeli Hai. He gave it to Anurag (Kashyap), who called to meet me. At that time, he was editing Bombay Velvet. He really liked the script and told me that he wanted to make it, but then again, a year went past like that, and nothing happened. Then my script got selected for Mumbai Mantra, and I had to pitch it to 70 producers, which was part of the deal of the Mumbai Mantra thing. That's where Honey Trehan read the script and liked it. So, I sold the script to Honey and Abhishek (Chuabey), who run Macguffin Pictures together. Now, around the same time, Vikram (Motwayne) was getting into Sacred Games, and since they had read my script, they thought that both Sacred Games and my film share the cop universe in some way, and called me to come on board. So, I was interviewed by someone at Netflix and got the job to work on Sacred Games. A scene from Sacred Games (Ishika Mohan Motwane/Netflix)
Sacred Games was your first release. Tell me what it was working on the first Netflix Original of India.
Initially, I thought I was only hired because I was a woman, and they just wanted to satisfy their DEI (Diversity, Equality, Inclusion) policy. And I was very conscious of that. Sudip (Sharma) was there for a little while before he moved on to work on Patal Lok because he could handle only one of those projects. Then there was Vasant Nath in the Writer's Room along with me, and Varun (Grover) was the lead writer on it.
Now, funnily enough, at FTII, what they do is, they stop the course for some time and get a person who teaches you to write for TV. Vinod Ranganathan was that person in our course. So, he came, and he was telling us about Netflix and digital and all that. He told us we should break our stories into 100 episodes, and we were like, 'What is he talking about?' We just wanted to get on with our film scripts and make films. So, initially, we wrote him off. But suddenly, I was very into what he was saying. He taught us how to break down a story into 100 episodes, what milestoning is and all of that. It was one of the most intense exercises, probably the most writing I ever did. I picked up Girls Hostel or Ladies Hostel – which eventually became Khauf – to write as a drama, not as horror.
Now, when I started working on Sacred Games, and when I read Vikram Chandra's book, my FTII learning appeared to me, and I thought, 'This is how you do it'. So, I was a trained writer, but that was not an asset. Because the others came from a different way of writing. We don't have a tradition of learning to write in this country. We don't have a studio system like in Hollywood where writers are churning out episode after episode week after week. In fact, a lot of Hollywood movies are adaptations of novels or plays. They have a hundred-year-old tradition of screenwriting. But here, it has always been mostly director-led. The director would get some people and tell them to write something, then many times, the director himself would get into writing. Then, for dialogues, they would hire someone else. For me, coming from FTII, it was quite different. I was a little impatient with reinventing the wheel. Writers here have not sat in a Writer's Room, they have never done it in a structured way. I'd say, it wasn't that pleasant for me. In terms of our social and political concerns, Varun and I were on the same page. But it was the nuts and bolts where it was difficult for me. A lot of the writing process was push and pull. For the other two writers, it was also a bit difficult that they were getting notes from an entity (Netflix) other than the director. For me, it wasn't new because getting notes from the BBC or National Geographic was normal in my earlier work. But in terms of excitement, the project was great for me. We broke down episodic beats together, worked on the structure. So, I thought, anything was possible after Sacred Games.
Did the credit on Sacred Games help you make what you wanted to?Sacred Games helped me get Midnight's Children. The project never happened, but we wrote it. It was with Vishal (Bharadwaj) ji. There was him, Minty Tejpal, Sabrina Dhawan and I in the Writers' Room. It was a great room. That project did not happen, but during that time, Vishalji read my script of Raat Akeli Hai and introduced me to Aparna (Purohit) at Amazon. So, she came on board, and then Honey (Trehan) and Abhishek (Chuabey) at Macguffin became Executive Line Producers. Honey has a great sense of drama, and he understood my script immediately. The script was already written, though I had been tinkering with it, and the film was then produced by RSVP. 'I picked up Girls Hostel or Ladies Hostel – which eventually became Khauf– to write as a drama, not as horror.' (Courtesy Prime Video)
Till recently, a writer would never be able to lead anything in cinema. But now, with the role of the 'Creator' on shows, they can. How was your experience creating Khauf and transitioning from a writer to a writer-creator?
I think, before I could do it with Khauf, Sudip (Sharma) was the only one who was a pure writer turned into a creator. Now, with me, there were concerns that there was no Writers' Room. People found it difficult to believe that I could write it all by myself. And I was very clear that I wanted to write alone. I had experienced Writers' Rooms previously, and I definitely did not want to walk that path. For me, way more important than the money or the credit for the show was writing alone. I really wanted to be left alone as a writer. Of course, there is a time when I'd open doors and invite opinions and feedback. In fact, I hired as a creative consultant, one of the most critical minds I knew from FTII, Professor Ashwini Mallick. I trusted him to be very objective about this. He helped me with the initial assessment along with one person at Amazon. We started off in 2020, then Covid hit, my parents were in the ICU and all of that. I asked Amazon if they wanted to get a big director, a big name to lead the project after I was done writing it, but then I realized, why would a big director come and work if I am the creator? So, I thought of leading the show myself.
That tells me you believe in the auteur theory. Do you?
Well, I do. But it's important to know where that belief is coming from. If I am seeing a woman, sitting by the window, biting into an apple, it's important to know where the image is coming from. If a director tells me this image, and I am writing according to his mind, he is the author, or auteur, of that, and I have just written that. But if every single image forming a narrative is coming from my mind, then I author that story. It's like asking if I believe that the author is the auteur of his novel. He always is, isn't he? Yes, I understand that cinema is more expansive and diverse as a medium. And a lot of the fights between writers and directors originate in this. It's the battle of authorship.
How do you define success as a screenwriter?
When you work with any material, there is a lot of thinking, a lot of struggle in the process of understanding it and finding your way with it. But there is a moment when you find the answers. Let's say you are struggling with a character arc, and then suddenly you think that this character has to kill someone, and only then will his arc be complete – that is the moment when you win. And nobody can take it away from you. When you have tortured yourself enough, for 16-20 hours a day sometimes, and then when you narrate it to someone, and their jaw drops, that, I think, is success as a screenwriter.
Which films and filmmakers have influenced you the most?
I didn't even know who Fincher was, and then I once got a DVD and watched Zodiac. Since then, I have watched that film at least twice every year. I can quote every dialogue. It has scenes that are insane, they are art. The film breaks the barrier between the audience and itself. I feel I am part of its scenes.
Then Polanski, of course. I don't know why I loved Polanski's and Woody Allen's films so much. I know there is something odd about that. But even before I knew about their lives, I have enjoyed their work. I have seen Woody Allen's work innumerable times. I have seen every Woody Allen film. Same with Polanski's work. I have seen each of his films.
I quite like John Carpenter's work as well.