It is a great time to be alive for Indian filmmakers and cinephiles. Never before have the audience been so acceptable, the distributors so liberal and producers so open about making the sort of content that we are viewing today. Sujoy Ghosh, one of India’s leading contemporary filmmakers has made a new quirky film titled Good Luck; that will be showcased across television screens on Star Channel. A 45-mins drama-thriller piece about a salesman selling a ‘commodity’, Good Luck is one of the first telefilm to come out in recent years. Amit Masurkar (Newton) spoke to the director of Ahalya, Anukul and Kahaani about how he went about making the film in a Q&A post the screening at the Mumbai Film Festival. Below is an excerpt:

Good Luck

Good Luck

Amit Masurkar: Tell us about how you came up with the idea for Good Luck.

Well the deep, meaningful answer for it would be, I don’t know! (laughs). We had a story and we knew we wanted to make a film out of it. We didn’t know whether we wanted to do it for TV or make a feature. We also realized the film will take about 45 minutes to tell; nothing more, nothing less than that. We couldn’t find the right platform and thankfully Star came on board. That’s when we sort of got into bed together and shared a smoke after that. See, you may have a lot of ideas and not necessarily all can be put on the big screen. We have other options now which we didn’t have before. We have television, we have web. Hopefully, this is the beginning of many more. We have two more lined up.

 

Amit Masurkar: What are the other two, and are you directing them?

Well, no I am not actually. I have directed just this, and produced the other two. They are quite interesting, not the kind of ideas that a box office producer would throw his money into, he would rather throw the script back at you! However Star is not like that. They allowed us to make the film like a film, there are no shortcuts. You get your equipment; you get your crew, everything.

 

Amit Masurkar: Tell us about your writing process, getting the cast on board and the process thereafter.

It is a little difficult, initially, to think of an idea as silly as trying to sell good luck. But then you think it through. Honestly there’s no process to it, there’s no right or wrong, it just happens. You’ve written Newton, you’d know! Once you’ve written it down, you search for the proper cast, and thankfully I had an incredible cast of Kunal and Tina. I can guarantee you that what I wrote on paper is far more inferior than what Kunal and Tina did to the characters. There are so many people out there who are genuinely willing to help out to make a film after all! We were supposed to have a long schedule in Goa, but we ran into some trouble. Still, we managed to film it completely in 5 days and hats off to the crew who made it happen without any whining or a whimper. They were absolutely professional even when everything around was against us.

 

Also Read: ‘..AT THE END OF THE DAY, IT’S THE EMOTIONS THAT MAKE THEIR WAY TO YOUR HEART.’ ~NISHIL SHETH