Streaming platforms have allowed us to tell different stories or stories differently, says Zoya Akhtar

Zoya: I think Gully Boy is like me. I'm born and bred in the Hindi film industry and I've got that commercial base, it's in my bones; I grew up on commercial cinema. But at the same time, because my mother (former actor Honey Irani) was studying films and my dad (Lyricist Javed Akhtar) is a poet, and they come from very different disciplines, there was a lot of literature and poetry in the house. We watched a lot of foreign films. So, I think there was always been an indie vibe and I’ve worked only on independent films till ‘Dil Chahta Hai’. So Gully Boy is a mix of commercial and independent and I think it has a kind of tone that comes very naturally to me.

Zoya: I think is unbelievable. (When you write for platforms), you are liberated, you don't have to pressure of the box office on your head, you don't have censorship, you don't have you don't have to cast necessarily big stars so you have to cater roles for them; it's liberating on many, many levels. You have no time bounds like TV where one episode has to be 22 minutes or 24 minutes; here one episode can be 25 minutes, the next one could be 30 minutes.

There's so much world content that people are watching that their palate is slowly changing. Suddenly you put your show out, and your show is next to ‘Powder’ and that show is next to ‘Mad Men’. So you're on a shelf with everyone and that way your audience will grow. You will consume and your work will be consumed.

Zoya: No. I think it's actually fantastic. It's actually not putting pressure, it's actually taking pressure away.

Zoya: It’s different. On one level, it gives you a lot of time to develop character. So it's a slow burn. You don't need to go chop, chop, chop, get to the point. You can actually take the time to evolve a character, layer a character or peel a character.

I anyway have a problem containing my script, so for me, it’s natural to go long format. I like my arcs and I like people to come in and go out. But at the same time, from a two-hour narrative you have to look at an 8-hour narrative, and know that it connects and holds and the payoff that started here ends there.

Zoya: You can always come and look for something specific, you can tell people like I'm looking in this genre, but I think you should be open. Because if you're only specifically looking for a black and white dress, that’s all you be looking for. So if you go into a store, and you say I'm going to see whatever I like, your energy is much more open and things come to you.

Zoya: I think I’ll take any genre and convert it into a coming-of–age genre film (laughs). I like it a lot.

Zoya: It's fantastic because if it (audience tastes) only showed one thing, then only that film would be made and we don't want that. We don't want that one type of movie to be made. We want all types of movies to be made. So sometimes this is going to blow up and sometimes that's going to blow up. Sometimes this is going to work, sometimes that will.

Zoya: There’s always room for more talent. You can be satisfied but the tide’s going to turn. That's the way it is. It's evolution. I think we have very, very talented people in this industry and they’re all thriving. The game has been upped. So it's good fun.

Zoya: I'm not keenly looking out for any particular regional work. You can say regional content has not been converted to Hindi cinema, but it's been converted to other languages…

Zoya: We don’t have access to those stories. If you don't read in a particular language, that anyway negates that, you're not looking for those titles then. Sometimes the adaptations to English aren’t great to read, so people don't really read them. When you look at your pop culture, you look at your news magazines, they’re not really covering that. If there was some great work in Gujarati and if the mainstream media covered it, I would be interested. But if I don’t have access, it’s not going to. That’s what a platform like Word To Screen is doing. It's taking people from the industry and it's putting it with all these literary people, and it’s just bypassing everything in the middle. That's the beauty of this.

Zoya: The good thing is that things have been streamlined, the money has been streamlined, the delivery dates have been streamlined. I mean, there are a lot of good things. I have to say I can't complain because I'm very protected by my producers. I work with Ritesh (Sidhwani) and Farhan (Akhtar) and I've been protected from my first film. Not because I’m doing well now. It’s always been like that, they really protect their talent and creators. (Excel Entertainment is an Indian film production and distribution company, founded by Ritesh Sidhwani and Zoya’s brother and actor-director Farhan Akhtar,)

But having said that, I do know that sometimes people (production houses) do not really understand the nuance of it (creative process of filmmaking), they want things in a particular way because that is what the market is dictating. That's what's working right now, so let's do everything that the market wants. But filmmaking is not a cookie cutter market. So there are pros and cons to everything you know.