The Miranda Brothers director Sanjay Gupta: ‘You cannot have fearless storytelling anymore’

While he gears up for The Miranda Brothers’ release, director Sanjay Gupta discusses setting the next Shootout edition outside Mumbai amid the ‘collapse of law and order’ in country

There has been much talk about the entertainment industry making room for stories over stars. But the on-ground reality is different, says Sanjay Gupta. The filmmaker learnt it the hard way as he set out to make The Miranda Brothers, starring Harshvardhan Rane and Meezaan Jafri. “To pull off such a film isn’t easy. I started my digital wing because we cannot ignore OTT,” he states. The casting for the football drama, set to première on JioCinema, had to be simple. The director needed two actors well-versed in the sport. “I wanted to make the film immediately. If I were to go to Varun [Dhawan] or Sidharth [Malhotra], I would have to wait for a year. None of the stars at that time were willing to do a direct-to-OTT film. Even now, most of them are not. As I shot this movie in Goa, I learnt that I’m not dependent on a crew of 300. You can be a big-ticket director and yet make a movie that you feel for. Every film doesn’t have to be with mega stars.”

Sanjay Gupta

The Miranda Brothers is a departure for Gupta, who, over the past three decades, has made movies about the Bombay underworld—be it the Shootout franchise, or Mumbai Saga (2019). But today, even as the underworld has reared its ugly head again with Baba Siddique’s murder, the director says the current environment can’t be reflected on celluloid. “These times cannot be chronicled because everything is state-controlled, even crime. You have Lawrence Bishnoi sitting in the Sabarmati jail, putting out videos and messages. What’s going on! This is a show of law and order collapsing. Ektaa [R Kapoor] and I are working on the third edition of the Shootout franchise. One of the decisions we’ve made is not to set it in Mumbai. These are uncertain times. So, we are researching to do [a story] outside Mumbai.”

Harshvardhan Rane and Meezaan Jafri in The Miranda Brothers 

This restraint is not in crime stories alone. Gupta rues that he has to often hold back as a filmmaker, given the current scenario. “If you’re an intelligent filmmaker and not too stubborn, you make the changes yourself because the legal department and OTT platforms go through the script and they censor it [preemptively]. They say this may land us in trouble, that may land us in trouble. It’s an atmosphere of fear. You cannot have fearless storytelling anymore. My next show is based on a true story that happened in Mumbai in front of our eyes, it was appalling. But we’re changing the names because you can’t take names anymore. I feel disillusioned on behalf of the new generation of filmmakers. They all have a voice. But how many of them will be able to express what they truly want to? There is no medium. Earlier, it seemed that you can say what you want on OTT. But now it has become the most censored as people heavily come down on them. Today, the filmmaker’s agency is taken away.”

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