Vikramaditya Motwane returned to the streaming space with the show Jubilee last month. The period drama, set in the ‘golden age of Indian cinema’, tells the tale of the rise and fall of fictional Bollywood superstar Madan Kumar in the 1940s and 50s. In an exclusive chat with DNA, the filmmaker talks about the acclaim the show has received, how it took almost a decade to make, and the future course for the story.
Jubilee has been critically acclaimed and loved by the audience as well. Motwane talks about which validation is most special for him. “The validation from everyone is so great, especially from the audience. But validation from your peers is something else. When fellow directors call up and praise you, it is fantastic,” he says.
Jubilee may have released in 2023 but its genesis dates back almost a decade. “It started in the Phantom Films offices back in 2013-14, where we realised a lot of the water cooler conversations were now not about films but series. The office of film geeks was discussing Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad and the latest season of Mad Men. We could see this go potentially huge. So we thought about potentially setting a series in the golden age of Indian cinema. That snowballed becoming a one-pager, which became a story and eventually a screenplay. And then Amazon loved it and decided to greenlight it,” recalls Motwane.
But then how and why it took so long to make Jubilee is a long story in itself. The show was greenlit at the same time as Sacred Games, which Motwane finished first. Eventually, when they did decide to begin filming in April 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic struck. “It got pushed back by a year because we had no other option. We didn’t know what was going to happen,” says the filmmaker.
The shoot began only in 2022, a frustrating wait bit one that was also a ‘blessing’, says the filmmaker. “I changed a couple of cast members, most prominently Niloufer (Wamiqa Gabbi) and we also got a long time to refine the script and fine tune a lot of stuff. It was very frustrating process at the time but it became a blessing in disguise,” says Motwane, talking about that period of waiting.
Jubilee stars Aparshakti Khurana and Sidharth Gupta as rival stars Madan Kumar and Jay Khanna. The two are seasoned actors but not exactly big stars. Explaining why he opted for non-stars as leads, Motwane says, “Some of the cast members had to be newcomers because you don’t know who these people are. You want them to succeed. They are not of the stature as the people above them. In my mind, that is the subtlety of casting. Had I cast Ranbir Kapoor as Jay Khanna, he would have been great for the role but would he have really brought the struggle of being in the refugee camp as an unknown face. It’s a fine line. Maybe it doesn’t matter but for me it did.”
The praise for Jubilee and the open-ended conclusion has left many wondering if there is a second season planned. Without showing all his cards, Motwane responds, “We are writing a season two. Amazon will trigger that when they do that. That’s a business decision they take but we are writing it. What we are writing, I can’t tell you.”
Jubilee, which also stars Aditi Rao Hydari, Prosenjit Chatterjee, and Ram Kapoor, is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
