Much of Nani’s look in the film is the result of a lot of brainstorming. To the character of a killer, they’ve added their own texture with their performance.īeyond what I’ve written on paper, Nani has added his own interpretations and created a certain texture to the character. I told them to watch all these guys not to imitate them, but to see how differently each actor was approaching the part. Similarly, I told Nani to look at films like No Country for Old Men, where Javier Bardem did the role of a psychopath, or Keanu Reeves’s role in The Watcher or Kevin Spacey’s role in Se7en. I don’t want a muscular police officer, I want someone lean and athletic. To Sudheer, I said, look at Brad Pitt (from Fight Club). I always wondered how it would be to blend these two genres: the visual style in terms of the noir look, of dark edges and brooding style, coupled with these really powerful emotional exchanges the dialogues, the dramatic scenes, and personal and family conflict.
Usually you have two protagonists, each representing one, like Amitabh Bacchan and Shashi Kapoor (in Deewaar). If you look at films like Deewaar, Trishul and Don, they were always about police versus gangsters or criminals, law versus crime. I was also a big fan of ‘70s Hindi cinema which very interestingly captured the conflict between systems. Two genres that have always fascinated me, the film noir of the American cinema of the ‘40s and ‘50s, and also the French noir that Jean-Pierre Melville and others have championed and mastered.