Podcast: Sujoy Ghosh on the Art of Crafting Thrillers

What’s Sujoy’s recipe to creating a thriller?

Filmmakers Sujoy Ghosh gets candid about his craft, pressures of Bollywood.

(Photo: The Quint)

Over the last decade Sujoy Ghosh has given memorable thrillers such as Badla and Kahaani, and most recently Typewriter, his first original web series for Netflix. He spoke to The Quint about the challenges of crafting a thriller and the pressure of delivering another Kahaani.

Here are some excerpts from the conversation:

From all the stuff you’ve made, the most success you have had is with your thrillers. What do you think that you are able to bring to that genre that works for people?

What you are complimenting me on, according to me, is a precondition for any filmmaker. You need whoever is seeing it to be invested in it because every time you fail to do that, the film doesn’t work.

When I was watching Typewriter, I wondered how did you think of these moments where you can suddenly shock me. How do you craft that?

You know, I wish I had a very intelligent answer to that but I don’t. It just happens. It’s like a stock broker – you take a call on a stock, it goes up and then comes down.

But this is also dark stuff [in Typewriter], this kind of stuff doesn’t happen. You can’t even say that it’s inspired from life or maybe partly, but where do these things happen, right?

Yes, in the head. But that’s what it’s all about,. It’s like what we read between the lines in The Secret Seven or The Famous Five. It’s like when you’re reading an Enid Blyton book and Timmy is running towards the cave, you think what can Timmy find inside the cave and what is in my head is what I put in the script.