Despatch director Kanu Behl: Why don’t people look at journalists as humans?

Despatch director Kanu Behl says he wanted to depict Manoj Bajpayee’s reporter as a fallible character with his own needs

Kanu Behl’s eight-year journey with Despatch came to an end last week as the Manoj Bajpayee-starrer dropped online. The director says through the ZEE5 film, his pursuit was to paint an honest picture of the journalistic community. “During our 18-month research, my co-writer Ishani Banerjee and I tried to get a picture of what the journalism world looks like from the inside. What emerged was that we live in a foggy atmosphere, where it’s hard to say who is doing what for what reason,” recalls Behl.

Kanu Behl

From there was born the protagonist, Joy Bag, a reporter who sets out to uncover a scam. But instead of depicting him as a holier-than-thou character, the director rooted him in reality, showing him as a man who feels powerless in most areas of his life and is desperate to be a hero. Behl shares, “Why do people not look at journalists as human beings? We wanted to do a character piece of this Faustian guy, who is fallible and has his own needs. We [asked ourselves], ‘Why is this guy trying to be a hero?’ We stumbled on this thought that heroes are born out of lack [of opportunities and justice]. That became the film’s central mantra.”

Behl also used physical intimacy to convey his characters’ conflicting emotions. Shooting intimate scenes can be tricky, but the director says his learning from his actor-parents, Lalit and Navnindra Behl, came in handy. “Both my parents were actors. So, I have a window into how actors think. When you have such a scene, the first thing they ask is, ‘Is this necessary? Why am I doing this?’ If the only answer you can give them is that it’s a sex scene, you should cut it out from the script. But the moment you can take your actors into confidence by telling them that this is the emotion you are transacting from them, the moment you can talk about it with them, it will put them at ease.”

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