Jamming on the highway

The directors and actors of the upcoming thriller Pune Highway discuss their stage-to-screen adaptation and finding their collaborative roots in theatre

I’ve always found the goings-on [in the play] to be extremely cinematic,” Bugs Bhargava Krishna, thespian, adman and one half of the writer-director duo behind Pune Highway, that releases in theatres on May 16, tells us. Sitting across from him on this warm May morning in their artfully arranged Bandra office is his long-time friend, fellow adman and co-writer and -director Rahul DaCunha who, more than two decades ago, also wrote the original play the film is based on. 

Although the play is boxed in by the constraints of the stage into one motel room, its cinematic potential was undeniable to Krishna, who also essayed one of the key characters in the original stage version. “Most of the play is actually a flashback where people are telling you what happened. So, all of that is visual material conveyed in dialogue, which you can shoot. I was fascinated by how Rahul had structured this play.” 

There was also, he points out, a sense of claustrophobia, a feeling of being surrounded, like in Alfred Hitchcock’s famously chilling Birds. “Any great thriller needs that claustrophobia,” admits Krishna. “It’s built into the situation where there’s a mob coming towards a motel where the characters are and you can almost feel the mob, or where you can feel the freedom of the couple next door who are having sex and it comes through the walls. The set pieces are remarkable.”

A still from the film Pune Highway

The screenplay took shape over the course of two months as many more locations, situations and characters were added, after which dialogues were written in and then given over to a third partner, Sudeep Naik, who turned it into Hindi. For DaCunha, who always wanted to give his play a second half, “the film became the Act II for the play”.

Pune Highway is what DaCunha calls “a buddy whodunnit”, a film primarily about friendship. Mumbai has had a tradition, he says, of people from vastly different backgrounds growing up in the same building and forging deep connections through the simple rituals of, say, the cricket games played in the corridor or a first kiss behind the water tank on the terrace. In DaCunha and Krishna’s writing, locations become characters as richly wrought as the people, believes comedian and screenwriter Anuvab Pal who plays one of the film’s trio of friends. “They do inanimate objects as characters really well in their writing.”

Pal also points to the complementary nature of the directors’ collaboration where DaCunha’s understanding of the characters melded with the visualisation Krishna — who has directed films like Barot House and Nail Polish before — brought to them. “One of the relentless things that I enjoy about the theatre is character,” admits DaCunha. “I love the unravelling of a character. Because I have been writing plays for so long, I don’t like to create characters who have a scene and then leave. For me, characters have to go through an arc. So even in Pune Highway, every character in our ensemble has a journey.”

Rahul DaCunha, director of Pune Highway

For Amit Sadh, the inclusiveness and sincerity felt on the film set reminded him of his equally enriching experience on the set of Abhishek Kapoor’s 2013 film Kai Po Che, which incidentally, was also a portrait of friendship and conflict. “It was a great feeling to be seen, to not to be used as a prop. It was just so comforting,” shares the actor who has shared a close relationship with Krishna since he played the lead in the latter’s 2019 thriller Barot House, and refers to him as a mentor. For Sadh, what set Pune Highway apart from his experiences on other film sets was how camera positions weren’t pre-set but determined after discussions with the actors. “They have so much faith in the actors and the process — not to mention the courage required, because this is time-consuming,” the actor comments. 

“The atmosphere that Bugs and Rahul created was that of a repertory theatre,” observes Anuvab Pal. For Pal, who admits to being relatively new to the acting process, the spirit of ease, creativity and participation and the directors’ “burst of infectious energy” was felt right from the start of his association with the film. “Bugs and Rahul know exactly what they want but they want to empower you to get there,” he says.

In the film, Pal plays Nicky, a character Krishna himself has essayed on stage. For Pal, not only was it important to avoid imitation and make the character stand on his own but it was also crucial to steer clear of exaggeration, a fairly common ask, he says, given his work and background in comedy. “What is really good about [DaCunha and Krishna’s] writing is that they avoid obvious humour. It allows you to play opposite type. The usual expectation is that the comic character will always do comic things [but] I find people laugh if the character does something credible, not if they do something ridiculous,” notes Pal. He cites how the writing contained clues to the character’s psychology. For instance, Nicky carries a video camera everywhere, the object signalling a deep-rooted insecurity it is possibly fulfilling. “It’s written for a very specific reason, not as a silly prop.”

DaCunha who is keen on bringing younger audiences to the theatre has plans of bringing his other plays to the screen as well. While Pune Highway’s theatrical release almost feels like a gamble at a time when “a 500-rupee ticket is equal to your entire Netflix subscription,” he hopes that the big screen’s appeal will stand. “We were mixing the soundtrack and were sitting in this tiny studio with speakers all around and this dialogue happened and I could hear the sound of water lapping. That day I realised that you just couldn’t get that on a phone. You’ve got to do it big. That’s how you get respect for film.”

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