A screenwriter’s hot tip for success: Create ‘something new, but rooted in Indian realities’

Two seasons of The Family Man and a third one out soon; the upcoming Indian chapter of the series Citadel; the film Baby John; a feature debut. Sumit Arora has a lot to look forward to apart from whatever else he has already achieved since he started writing for television and later films and web series.

Born in Meerut, 36-year-old Arora, a student of Hindi literature, is among the leading wordsmiths behind a popular films and series. His early milestones include television shows and the web series Selection Day in 2019.

Arora has formed a fruitful association with Raj & DK, who created The Family Man and Guns & Gulaabs. Arora has also written dialogue for the horror-comedy Stree, Reema Kagti’s show Dahaad and Atlee’s 2022 blockbuster film Jawan. Most recently, Arora was one of the three writers of Chandu Champion, Kabir Khan’s biopic of gold-winning Paralympian Murlikant Petkar.

While there is probably no better time to be a writer, the pressure to deliver quality alongside quantity has never been greater. Streaming platforms are churning out new shows as well as commissioning extensions to existing titles in the hope that something will stick. The frenzy over a movie’s box office performance is weighing on filmmakers.

Despite warm notices, Chandu Champion had an underwhelming run – just one of the instances of the headwinds faced by the Hindi film industry. The delicate balance between a “mass product” and thoughtful writing, as well as evolving popular taste, were among the subjects Arora touched upon during an interview with Scroll. Here are edited excerpts.

Let’s start with streaming. What has changed for you as a writer over the past few years?

Initially, the focus of streaming was on prestige projects. There was more time given to development and writing. That has slightly reduced. The medium itself has gone mass.

So much high-quality content is now available to audiences at a single click. They have become much more aware and demanding. The big switch is there in your own families. People are watching dubbed or subtitled content more than ever. My mother used to watch Pakistani shows. She now watches Korean shows.

Audiences want something new, but it has to be rooted in Indian realities. It also has to compete with the best content in the world. Previously, content was merely aspirational, but not rooted in the soil of the land.

You have worked extensively with Raj & DK. What about their world-building appeals to viewers?

They are lovely to work with. We met at the time of Stree [Raj & DK wrote Amar Kaushik’s 2018 film, with Arora supplying the dialogue]. We realised that our writing and style of humour were pretty much the same. That’s when they offered The Family Man to me.

The brief for The Family Man was the line that Raj & DK had cracked: Srikant is a world-class spy and a middle-class guy. That irony of these two extremes is the core of the show.

The idea was to present the contrast. The domestic layer that was going on parallel to the world-class tag was the focus in terms of the dialogue. My responsibility was to get to the middle class-ness of a spy. He is not James Bond in his behaviour. He can pull off the most serious tasks, but he remains middle class.

The mangalsutra scene from season one became famous. Srikant hitches a ride from a woman by telling her that the terrorist he is chasing has stolen his wife’s mangalsutra. You won’t find moments like these in a typical spy film.

In their films and shows, Raj & DK prefer a particular kind of dry, pithy humour. Their characters tend to be smart and witty too.

There is a certain rhythm to their sense of humour. A character’s personality comes out through the dialogue. These are clever people. They won’t say anything just to sound funny.

Yet, the humour is constant. It is mostly in the form of banter or free-flowing, real conversations. So the dialogue becomes very important.

My own interest while writing dialogue is to look for humour and substance. I have never done a comedy that is just a comedy. I like writing humour, but it needs to be supported by good substance. I like to have these two layers and then I know I can add value.

Do you write differently for films as opposed to shows?

Watching something in a theatre is different. You experience whatever is happening on the big screen directly. The humour has to be pitched up. You need that laugh-out-loud feeling. The action has to be a wow action. It’s more sensory compared to streaming. Subtle humour is a more of a thing for streaming.

The dialogue of Jawan was written for the theatrical experience. It had a certain style, and you could imagine what the reaction in the theatre would be like. When the actor is a big star, the dialogue will have a larger-than-life appeal.

Stree was more of a content-heavy film than a star-led film, but the dialogue and scenes were written for big laughs. There was a concerted effort to create moments where we would have laughter. You have to be aware of it.

How do writers deal with the pressure of delivering box office hits? Do they have to tailor their styles to keep up with shifting audience taste?

You have to stay in touch, at least in terms of knowing what is working and not working, but you cannot manufacture a point of view on that basis. Industry trends can’t define what you are working on next.

If something doesn’t excite you as a creator, you won’t be able to create anything good out of it anyway. You have to feel for a subject and enjoy it enough to last for the years taken to complete a project.

Eventually, you too are part of the audience. You came into this field because somewhere you enjoyed watching stuff. Once you switch sides, what would you want to watch? I try to look for what I would enjoy watching as an audience. The answer to that is what I will be working on.

Chandu Champion didn’t perform as well as expected. What was your experience on the film, and why didn’t it work?

Whilst the film is inspiring, the fact is that people did not go into theatres in big numbers. One thing was clear – whoever watched the film came out loving it. They were surprised by the film, they weren’t expecting it to be this good. Of course, it’s possible that I didn’t get to hear the bad reactions.

What people seem to want from the theatrical experience is something very dramatic, masaledaar [rousingly entertaining]. Chandu is a heartfelt, straight-on biopic of an unknown figure. If you hear the story of Murlikant Petkar and his achievements, it’s his journey that is the remarkable part.

The film isn’t about a Paralympian per se. It’s not just about winning a gold at the Olympics. The journey includes all what we tried to show in the film – how he got into the Army, went to Tokyo, got injured in war, built his strength from that point onwards. The story we chose to tell was of a man who never gave up.

Historically, a lot of films find their audiences only later. With streaming, the film will find its audience.

Which are your favourite moments from Chandu Champion?

There are so many. There is the final scene where all of Chandu’s memories come back to him. He is thinking of the lows and highs, the crucial moments of his life before he takes the last victory lap. He has always fallen short of a big victory. He is thinking of the people who have mocked him, or moments that have choked him as a person. He doesn’t let the moments stop him but uses them to fuel him. I was very happy with how the scene came out in the final edit.

There are also two important scenes with the coach Tiger Ali played by Vijay Raaz. One is when Chandu says to him, give me one more chance and Tiger says, says you were my chance and you have failed me. The other is when Tiger comes back into Chandu’s life, takes him to watch the Dara Singh wrestling match, and inspires him again.

You wrote the dialogue for Tamil director Atlee’s Hindi-language debut Jawan and his upcoming production Baby John, directed by Kalees. What lessons are to be learnt from southern filmmakers, who seem to have a solid understanding of popular taste?

Baby John has been a very interesting experience. It’s a completely different school of thought. These filmmakers look for mass moments, mass emotions. They always have dialogue that defines the hero.

It’s an art too, a different kind of art. It’s not easy to crack. People in Hindi films have tried and failed badly because they’re trying to create a copy of a mass moment. But it’s an organic thing. You can’t manufacture it like a topping. Bollywood films create the topping but not the base itself.

How do you consciously create mass-appeal moments?

It is very difficult to explain. It has to be learnt. You have to become the audience yourself.

We used to call this kind of dialogue seetimaar [whistle-worthy]. Now we use the term meme-worthy. I too have tried to create such key dialogue in Chandu Champion. There is that line “Ae, hasta kayko hai?” You know that it can be repeated by people in their own lives.

I had a very humble environment as a kid. So I am aware that the strength of my writing is that it comes from the street, from an understanding of a common person.

How did you get into filmmaking?

I am from Meerut. I studied in a Hindi-medium school. My father liked typical masala films. My mother would drag me away from these films.

I have watched many of these films in cinemas. But I wasn’t fully into masala films. One part of me was leaning towards what my mother had laid out for me, which was literature. I would read a lot as a kid. I have read many of the Hindi classics as well as translations of world classics into Hindi. And a lot of satirists like Shrilal Shukla, Harishankar Parsai and Sharad Joshi.

My mother’s influence took me to literature, while my father's influence got me to masala films. That’s how this binary was created in me. I am writing big-screen mass films but also doing interesting content like Dahaad and The Family Man that are much more layered.