Vikram Vedha directors Pushkar-Gayatri open up on South remakes, talent crossover in Indian cinema | Exclusive

Pushkar and Gayatri, the husband and wife filmmakers, are on cloud nine as their debut web series Suzhal: The Vortex, an edge-of-the-seat crime thriller set in the fictional town of Sambaloor, is being highly appreciated by the audience, critics, and celebrities for its gripping story, well etched-out characters, brilliant cinematography, and sensational music.

The directors are set to make their Bollywood debut by remaking their own Tamil blockbuster Vikram Vedha, which starred R. Madhavan and Vijay Sethupathi in the leading roles. In the Hindi version set to release on September 30, Saif Ali Khan and Hrithik Roshan take up the central characters of Vikram and Vedha respectively.

In a freewheeling conversation with DNA, Pushkar and Gayatri talked about the ongoing remake trend in Bollywood, and the talent crossover within the Indian film industries.

"I think the step forward is what has happened with Suzhal. It's a Tamil language original and it started off as being Amazon's first scripted original in Tamil. After seeing the show in Tamil, everybody at Amazon was really really excited and said 'we will release it in all the languages in India'. Then, within a couple of weeks, they said, 'hey, we are going to release it in a whole bunch of countries and it's going to be dubbed in foreign languages'. So, I think the way forward is we have to be language agnostic", Pushkar said.

He continued, "We still strongly believe in rooting the story to a time, space, and language. But the way people see it will be what is most comfortable for them. We are very used to seeing another language film with subtitles, but not everybody is so. If you're grown up reading subtitles, you will be very comfortable with it, while my mom is happier seeing a dubbed version of a Hindi film."

Stressing the fact that Indian audiences should now start consuming Indian content, Pushkar added, "So, I think the way forward is to understand that content will work. Films or web series which connect to human emotions will work in whichever language. It's just that all this while, we are consuming content from all over the world, it's time that India starts consuming content from other territories, and the rest of the world starts looking at Indian content which is at that level."

READ | Vikram Vedha directors Pushkar-Gayatri reveal why they didn't cast R Madhavan in Hindi remake | Exclusive

Talking about the North vs South cinema debate, Pushkar told DNA, "I don't think it's a for one to survive, the other must die kind of scenario. I think with the kind of viewers we have, there is so much space for films from any language all across India. It is not like one film does well, another film will have to fail for the first to do well." 

Gayatri pitched in and said, "Right, the story has to work, irrespective of the language. One thing we are proud of is that most of the other industries like European including the French, the German, the Italian - all those film industries have taken a backseat and Hollywood has actually taken over. We are still able to have a robust industry by itself across languages and across so many cultures."

When the director duo was asked about the talent crossover within the Indian film industries, Pushkar told DNA, "About high time, this all started happening. Every industry is insular and there are many reasons why they have been that way with the idea of protecting the market and ensuring that the local industry grows and all that. But now, with all the exposures that the streaming platforms are giving like Amazon Prime Video has movies from Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali everything on a platform and people are watching all that."

"There have been a bunch of Tamil movies that have done extremely well on Amazon Prime Video. Now that the audiences have started seeing stuff from all over, people from all over the country will also start working all over the stuff. I see a brilliant stunt sequence in a Bengali film, I want to know who is that stunt director, call him over and get him to work on a film. And that is because now the access is there. The opening up of the viewing experience is quintessentially what is driving this forward.", Pushkar concluded.