Filmmaker Amar Kaushik’s Stree 2 promised to be an entertaining ride but not many would have expected it to create such a bang at the box office. The film has earned a mammoth Rs. 242.40 crores in just five days. Apart from the makers and the cast, the credit for this also largely goes to the film’s writer Niren Bhatt.
In an exclusive chat with Bollywood Hungama, Bhatt spoke in jest about the film’s numbers. “Haan yaar chaar din mein 200 crores ke baad kaisa lagta hai yeh hum bhi seekh rahe hain pehli baar (laughs). We have seen this happening only to films starring big stars,” he said.
Speaking about what were their expectations before the release, he said, “As the release date starts approaching, your expectations start fading,” he said. “We had a certain level of confidence that it’s an entertaining film and it will do well. But the kind of numbers that are coming, obviously, neither Amar nor I had expected. But this proves that people appreciate good content and story, regardless of the people associated with it. People only wish to see a good and clean entertainer.”
The Sarkata monster in Stree 2 has become a rage and he is an important part of the film. While sharing how the whole idea came into being, Bhatt explained, “The destroyed idols in the cave where they cut the choti of Stree in the first film has her backstory through murals saying that she had a lover when she was a sex worker. The lover was shown headless. Now whether the head was cut because it was a destroyed idol, or someone had cut is not even mentioned in the first film. But after looking at it we thought that we can make a monster out of him whose head is missing.”
He continued, “But he can’t be Stree’s lover because he was killed and why would he go against Stree and become a danger for others? Then I came with the idea that he has to be the person who killed Stree and her lover and became responsible for making her the Stree. That’s how he became the symbol of patriarchy.”
Stree 2, like the first film, provides a message against patriarchy but in a subtle manner. Coming to this, Bhatt said, “We have been taking this call in all our films. What we try to do is we keep the messaging through the visuals and ensure that it comes through entertainment, instead of a person preaching it. The question is you want to defeat patriarchy but how will you do it? That’s why Pankaj Tripathi ji’s character says that he (Sarkata) is Chanderi ka pitru aur apni satta sthapit karne aaya hai. So, the translation of patriarchy is ‘pitru satta’.”
He added, “It’s not men versus women. Patriarchy affects both the genders equally. That’s why both stree and purush will need to come together. That’s why there is a metaphor of ardha-nareshwar that when Shiv and Shakti’s union will take place, only then you can enter his (Sarkata’s) world and defeat him. This is how through such incidents and VFX, we keep the messaging in the background, so that it’s conveyed subtly.”
Bhatt revealed that they didn’t want to make a sequel to Stree just for the sake of it. “When he (Amar Kaushik) directed the first part, he never had the idea of a sequel in mind, although it had certain aspects through which a sequel could have been made, but we didn’t have much idea,” he said.
Sharing about his process of writing with the makers, Bhatt said, “I believe in pursuing each thread. The ideas which he (Amar) and I get, we first write it down. Then we judge whether it’s good enough. If we both like it, then we bounce it off to Dinu (Dinesh Vijan) and if he also likes, then we run with it. Me and Amar have been working together since Bala. We have a different process of working. We sit and speak a lot about ideas and how do we go about things. We worked in the same way during Bhediya and Bala.”
Starring Ayushmann Khurrana, Bala was about a man who loses his hair in a young age. Sharing a funny anecdote before writing Bala, Bhatt recalled, “I told him (Amar Kaushik) that I have thick black hair. And same is the case with my father even at the age of 75. So, I said, ‘I don’t know about hair loss, so how will I write a film on it?’ Amar had an episode of hair loss, so he explained what all happens in it, like how you keep losing hair while taking a bath or combing your hair and how you keep a count of the hair loss on each day (laughs). This is how I got the idea of the entire film. This is how we keep developing ideas.”
Bhatt has a long and diverse body of work. Apart from the aforementioned films, he wrote the well-known TV show Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah for years. He also wrote the serial killer web show Asur, Munjya and a number of Gujarati films and Hindi TV shows.
Speaking about his experience of working in different mediums, Bhatt said, “The most challenging medium and the one that fascinates me the most has always been films. I haven’t grown up watching OTT. I also haven’t grown up watching the kind of shows being made today. All of us grew up during the era of Doordarshan. The biggest fascination in life has always been cinema. It’s a community experience. People are seen laughing, crying, whistling together.”
Coming back to the start of the discussion about Stree 2’s phenomenal box office collection, Bhatt humbly said that they can’t let the numbers affect them while writing the future films in Dinesh Vijan’s horror-comedy universe.
“We will definitely need to forget that (box office collections),” he said. “In the end, we are telling different stories to people. Some stories connect more while some connect less. So, if you do decide to do something similar because it worked at the box office once, it won’t work because there will be no novelty factor. You will have to create new stories each time. It is challenging and risky, but this is what you will need to do.”
Starring Rajkummar Rao, Shraddha Kapoor, Pankaj Tripathi, Aparshakti Khurana and Abhishek Banerjee, Stree 2 is produced under the banners of Maddock Films and Jio Studios.
Also Read: EXCLUSIVE: Meet Sunil Kumar, who plays Sarkata in Stree 2; is 7.6 feet tall and is called ‘The Great Khali of Jammu’
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