What are your favourite war films?

Sriram Raghavan: Among Indian films, Chetan Anand’s Haqeeqat, Govind Nihalani’s Vijeta, and J.P. Dutta’s first Border. In foreign films, there are just too many. The Clint Eastwood pair: Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.Saving Private Ryan, of course. Paths of Glory,Battle of the Bulge, a lot of David Lean films. At Film and Television Institute of India, we saw many Russian films: The Cranes Are Flying,Ballad of a Soldier and things like that. The Russians make three or four war movies a year. It is a thriving genre there. There is a beautiful Israeli film called Lebanon, set almost entirely inside a tank. Only in the last shot does the character step outside. Harrowing. And a French film, Weekend at Dunkirk, by one of my favourites, Henri Verneuil.

Arijit Biswas: From Indian cinema, Haqeeqat and Lakshya. Border I saw but could not really get behind. I don’t like to come into a war film very programmed. The whole thing seemed slightly artificial to me. As for Hollywood, there is a treasure trove of war films starting right from the American Civil War. The first for me is The Bridge on the River Kwai. The moral ambiguity is total. Then Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Longest Day, Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far. These films have a certain pathos. They do not celebrate the victor or the vanquished. They ask why the war is being fought at all. Like The Thin Red Line.Saving Private Ryan could have been an even finer film, but somewhere the beautiful story got swallowed by massive production value. And Cross of Iron, obviously. Ballad of a Soldier, Battle of the Bulge, the Alistair Maclean films…those were good fun. But as we grew up, we realised there was more to war films than glorious adventure.

Sriram Raghavan: There are quite a few like that, the likes of Samuel Fuller’s The Steel Helmet and others, which are not conventional Hollywood productions and show the grittier side of war. Come and See by Elem Klimov. Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood. John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, told from two children’s points of view. The Zone of Interest, of course.

Arijit Biswas: Is Zone of Interest a war film? Not really. War unfolds entirely in the background. What an extraordinary way to tell a concentration camp story.

Do you think there are genre conventions that define war movies, or can we use that term for any dramatic story set against war?

Sriram Raghavan: Conventions exist, but it is up to you whether to follow them. Lebanon does not use a single conventional trope. Paths of Glory is not conventional by any standard. Each filmmaker brings their own approach.

Arijit Biswas: The fundamental difference between Indian war films and Hollywood’s is that they have lived through war and conscription. Conscription gets war into households. Families after families have been evicted from cities, many of them have turned refugees. The amount of social strife that has occurred in Europe and these big wars, has not occurred in India. To mention another war film: the desolation of All Quiet on the Western Front, where an entire class goes to war and only one comes back, that emotional landscape where entire families fall prey to a long winding war, does not exist in our lived memory. So, our war stories need to be different. We cannot simply borrow those templates.

Sriram Raghavan and Arijit Biswas discuss the making of Ikkis,war cinema, and nationalism. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Was Ikkis a conscious departure from Sriram’s usual territory of thrillers and suspense?

Sriram Raghavan: It cannot be entirely unconscious. There was a script and a story that brewed for years. When I heard it, and then narrated it to Arijit, we both found enormous possibility in it. We loved it. It is a true story. One rarely gets a subject that arrives almost as a ready-made script. I have had this story for five years or more.

Arijit Biswas: What drew us in was how the story intertwined family, human emotion, and battlefield bravery. When Sriram first told me, we were still shooting Andhadhun. My first reaction was: did this really happen? He said yes. It had been published. After Andhadhun wrapped, he and Pooja Ladha Surti went and met everyone involved. We researched extensively.

Given how volatile the Indo-Pak question remains, were you conscious of the sensitivity? Did you hesitate at any point?

Sriram Raghavan: Not really. The story develops across two timelines: 1971 and 2001. You see Arun’s journey, and you also follow his father travelling to Pakistan, visiting his hometown, attending his college reunion, being hosted by the very man responsible for his son’s death. That is an extraordinarily dramatic situation. When Spielberg made Schindler’s List, he was not making it for the audiences of that time. It was about a moment in history.

Arijit Biswas: What makes the situation stranger is that this film is actually about a Pakistani commander commending the bravery of one of our heroes. We live in times where even that gets read as appeasement. I do not believe that the majority holds this view but, for one reason or another, we did not get footfalls in theatres. When people actually get to see the film, I am confident they will understand the honesty behind it.

Sriram’s films typically avoid binary heroes and villains. Was it a struggle to sustain that ambiguity in a war film, where an enemy is clearly defined?

Sriram Raghavan: Those parallels are for critics to draw. When we were researching Arun Khetarpal, we had no interest in a comic book version of him. I met a number of his National Defence Academy colleagues. We got a sense of Arun as a kid who was not infallible. He broke up with his girlfriend because he felt the relationship was a distraction. He was not, of course, aware that he was a hero. That word was conferred on him after December 16, at 11:30, when he was no more. His fellow soldiers and compatriots had great things to say about him. But here it was the enemy, also a witness to Arun Khetarpal’s bravery in battle, who sang his praises. “He stood like a rock between us and victory,” the Pakistani Brigadier said about Arun.

How did Dharmendra’s casting come about?

Sriram Raghavan: Dharamji was our first and only choice. I met him. He loved the story completely. Whenever I would visit, he would say, “Tell it to me again. Tell me about the boy, tell me about his father once more.” He would hear it all over again. With a veteran like Dharmendra, language was very important. We would write scenes in English or in my kind of Hindi, then sit down with him to work through his dialogues. He was extremely effusive in his contribution. He spoke about his own childhood, about going back to his hometown. So many things merged for him. I am so happy he did it.

Arijit Biswas: Sriram, Pooja, and I are all huge fans of Dharamji. For this character, we always had just him in mind. At some point, the production floated a few other names, perhaps because they worried he was a bit too old. Had he said no, we would have been at a complete loss. Thankfully, it never came to that. He said, “This is me. This is my role. Nobody else can do this.”

Sriram Raghavan: There is a poem he recites in the film. It is entirely his own; he writes a lot. I asked if we could use one, he agreed. About the tree: when we visited his hometown, he said that in the rustle of the leaves, he could hear his father and his grandfather. We found a very similar tree at our location. It was serendipity. The childhood in that scene is from the 1930s. A different time. A different country.

Arijit Biswas: Dharamji told us this cute story about his childhood crush, who lost contact with him once he came to Bombay. He mentioned her name, which I cannot recall right now. It was two syllables. So, we just changed her name to “Husna”.

How did you balance factual accuracy with dramatic license?

Sriram Raghavan: Our intent was never to over-dramatise. It is a thin line. The only cinematic liberty we took was the confession scene. In reality, it occurred at Nisar’s home, during a gathering. We felt this was a wonderful opportunity to take them out to the actual landscape.

Arijit Biswas: Once you know the landmarks and the events, you build a story around them. The subjects often welcome these liberties because they understand that this is not a documentary. All the fundamental pillars of this story were presented as they occurred. Did they move exactly like that, did they eat biryani on that precise day? Those details matter far less than the larger truth.

Indian war films almost always carry a current of heightened nationalism. Was that a pressure you felt?

Arijit Biswas: We have not lived through a protracted war as a nation. Conscription has not been part of our lives. A certain additional adrenaline in Indian war films perhaps helps audiences enter unfamiliar emotional territory. In Europe, people’s grandfathers died in wars. Those stories have been traded over dinner tables for generations. For us, it is a little different and we need those emotional highs in our films. But with Ikkis we did not take that path because this story is not about bravado or vanquishing the enemy. War is central to it, yes, but the life around war matters just as much.

Sriram Raghavan: People told me after the film underperformed that it needed to be ramped up. I do not believe that is true because the people who actually lived through this, the army men, have always been with us. When I screened the film for over 800 people in Delhi—veterans, young officers, the top brass of the Indian Army—they all had tears in their eyes. Arun Khetarpal’s family was there. It was a beautiful evening. It is not the kind of film you walk out of whistling because you have won something. It is quieter by its very nature. There were real people who died. We did not want to give them filmy death scenes.

Screengrab from Ikkis. The creators of the movie note that factual accuracy and dramatic license are a fine balance to maintain. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

How did you ensure accuracy on the Pakistani side of things?

Sriram Raghavan: We had Indian Army officers with us. Brijendra Singh—who was there with Arun both at the IMA (Indian Military Academy) and at war—knew the battle well. There was substantial literature on how those tanks operated. We could not easily access the internal designs of Pakistani tanks, so we had to reconstruct them. There is a tank museum in Ahmednagar where we examined a couple of Patton tanks, saw the extent of the damage, the size of shells. We had Nisar’s own account of the battle, and books from both sides.

Arijit Biswas: The support from the Indian Army was absolutely incredible. Officers from the Pune unit came and played the Madras unit for the Battle of Basantar. They gave us tanks, though the models looked so different we could only use them as silhouettes. It was all authentic.

Was Jaideep Ahlawat always the choice for the role of Nisar?

Sriram Raghavan: We had a few names, but the combination with Dharamji had to work. They share the most screen time together. Once I met Jaideep, I learned that his first love had always been the army. He did not get in, which is how he ended up at the Film Institute. And like the rest of us, he was a devoted admirer of Dharamji. It all fell into place.

Arijit Biswas: The big casting change everyone already knows about was Varun Dhawan. COVID and other factors meant years passed, and it became impossible to cast him convincingly as a 21-year-old. I think he took it quite sportingly.

Saba, in Ikkis, documented her father’s three-day journey through a handheld camera. Was that incorporated after casting Avani Rai, as she is a documentary filmmaker herself?

Sriram Raghavan: No. It was there initially, and then it turned out when I met Avani, that she is a documentary filmmaker. So that was good.

How did the two-timeline structure come about?

Arijit Biswas: It was clear from the very beginning that these two stories could not be told in separate halves. They had to cut into and support each other, otherwise it would simply not be interesting enough. Once that was settled, decisions like where to begin, which scene goes where, became a three-year exercise. We had several opening sequences that did not survive, including one about how Arun’s tank Famagusta was discovered in 1979. The first proper draft was around mid-2021, and we had been working on it since 2019. It is like gathering flowers before they are stitched into a garland.

Sriram Raghavan: I met Arun’s surviving tank men. They gave us dozens of stories: how they ate rotis in the cold, using a stove jury-rigged inside the tank through bullet holes in a toolbox. There was a sequence in the December morning fog where Arun’s men fired on what turned out to be their own side. Both sets of war cries were Indian. That was in the script for a long time before we realised the film would run to three hours and exceed our budget.

Arijit Biswas: There was a scene we loved but never shot. The news of Arun’s death reaches his family just as ceasefire is declared and celebrations break out. People are bursting firecrackers, eating laddos. A postman, mid-chew, delivers the telegram. Arun’s mother faints. Victory is not something you can buy in a shop like laddos. Somewhere, a family always pays for it in blood. We could not find somewhere to place it without breaking the thematic flow, so it had to go.

How does the collaboration between the two of you actually work?

Sriram Raghavan: Sometimes, it starts with a back-of-the-book summary I like, not even the book itself. The original novella in Badlapur had eight letters exchanged between two men in different prisons, one in a jail and the other in a mental institution. That was it. We had to open it up completely and do our thing. With Andhadhun, Arijit pushed back on a scene I was quite certain about: the moment Akash removes his glasses. In my version, there was a moment where he takes them off and indicates to the audience that he could see. Arijit insisted that Akash needed a real, strong reason to do it. He has heard the girl speak, he is fascinated by who she is, she has told him something, and now he needs to take good look at her. After a couple of discussions, I was completely convinced. Now I am grateful I did not go with my version.

Arijit Biswas: It is fluid. We sit down, we talk. Some days great things emerge, on others nothing does. Little scenes gather into a kind of shoebox. Slowly, a critical mass forms and we can see where we actually are. We go deep into individual sequences long before the full structure is clear. It is very open-ended, and it takes its time. Which is why we take our time as well.

Do you think the marketing contributed to the film’s tepid box office performance?

Sriram Raghavan: I am baffled at the theatrical response, honestly. I normally keep some distance from the trailer because it is difficult for me to be objective. The trailer was done by the Maddock’s team, and I thought it was fine. Dharamji’s song also went out separately. I just do not know why it was not better received in theatres.

Sriram, you have never worked with stars at their absolute peak. Is that a constraint or a feature?

Sriram Raghavan: I have never caught them at their peak. Either on the way up or on the way down. My films are not everybody’s cup of tea. Every single one has been rejected by so many stars. With Johnny Gaddar, people asked what kind of film this was. With Andhadhun, we approached five or six actors before Ayushmann came into the picture. In a way, it is probably a good sign. It means the stories are bafflingly new. They might say yes to the same old thing, but who really wants to keep doing the same thing over and over?