Filmmaker Ashish R Shukla has been overwhelmed by the praise he has got from all quarters for his directorial venture, web series Undekhi, a crime thriller on Sony Liv that premiered on July 10, 2020.
Born and brought up in Mumbai to a father who worked for the railways and a homemaker mother, Ashish would spend his day painting or watching sculptors at work in the neighbourhood.
"I wanted to become a vocalist, but could not convince my parents. After graduation, I had to rebel to join a commercial art school. Even after that, it took a lot of time for my parents to understand what I do," says Shukla who, after a brief stint in the ad world with adman Prahlad Kakkar, made his first short film in 2006.
"At that time Anurag Kashyap, some other filmmakers and I, used to write for Passionforcinema.com. After watching my film, he told me how much he had loved it and offered me a job. Rest is history," he says. Excerpts:
Did you expect such an overwhelming response to Undekhi?
Not at all. We knew we were creating a great show and the audiences will like it. But we were sceptical as there are no poster boys to promote it.
When you create a work like Undekhi, do the expectations increase manifold?
Absolutely, this is where it starts from. Now, your every step will be scrutinised and criticised. Maintaining excellence is a huge challenge, but one is trying to stay focused, unaffected and follow the same path with humility.
Will OTT be the next big thing or is this just a phase due to COVID-19?
More than the big thing, due to COVID-19, it has become a necessity for existence in the industry. Storytellers won’t have to think about weekends or how much a film made in the first week and so on. Now every film, small or big, is just a thumbnail on OTT and that’s the beauty of it. Either you work on your content or you are a click away.
Secondly, a web series helps you know the characters better and lets you unfold their life and the story without being bothered by the length.
How and when did films happen to you?
Films happened before I became a commercial artist. I was seven or eight when I saw Salaam Bombay on DD and its realism struck me. Since then I have been trying to explore that art form. I had to choose commercial art as I dropped out from my graduation and could not join a film school as I wasn’t a graduate. I majored in photography considering it will have some relevance with filmmaking, and assisted ad guru Prahlad Kakkar during my art school days.
Tell us about your next, Bahut Hua Sammaan.
It is a satirical comedy about two mechanical engineering students, Raghav Juyal and Abhishek Chauhan, whom you’ve seen in Cubicles. Both are small-time conmen who decide to rob a bank as per a master plan by a been-there, know-it-all soul in their college, ‘Baba’ Sanjay Mishra. Both are all set to get rich before their paper perfect plan falls flat, opening a Pandora’s box and awakening the beast, played by Ram Kapoor.