‘IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack’ director Anubhav Sinha: ‘An accessible thriller with layering’

A new streaming series revisits a terrorist attack from 25 years ago that ballooned into a diplomatic crisis. IC 184: The Kandahar Hijack looks back on an Indian Airlines flight that was commandered by Islamists in 1999. Directed by Anubhav Sinha and written by him and Trishant Srivastava, the show will be premiered on Netflix on August 29.

The six-episode limited series explores the ordeal of the crew and passengers as well as the Indian government’s response. IC 814 took off for Delhi from Kathmandu on December 24, 1999. Five terrorists hijacked the plane and eventually landed in Kandahar in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

The standoff – during which a passenger died – ended on December 30 after the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led government freed three jailed terrorists. They included Masood Azhar, whose outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed carried out the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, and Omar Saaed Shaikh, accused of beheading American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.

Anubhav Sinha’s attempt with IC 184: The Kandahar Hijack, he said in an interview with Scroll, was to deliver an “accessible thriller” while stringing together various strands. Controversies surrounded the actions of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government. External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh was roundly criticised for capitulating to the hijackers’ demands and even accompanying the liberated terrorists to Kandahar.

Sinha wasn’t interested in a blame game, he told Scroll. “I was trying to present the show exactly in the manner in which it happened,” added the director of the films Thappad (2020) and Bheed (2023).

For “politically involved and initiated” viewers, the series could provoke a debate on the choices that were eventually made, Sinha said. “There is a lot of conjecture and triangulation of information in different quarters,” he said. “I have a view on what was right and wrong, but that’s a personal view. Any view of an event with so many intermingling decision-making processes is bound to be subjective, which is fine.”

The series is adapted from Flight into Fear – A Captain’s Story, written by the plane’s pilot Devi Sharan with Srinjoy Chowdhury. The series also draws on flight purser Anil Sharma book IA’s Terror Trail.

Terrorism expert Adrien Levy has a story credit – he co-authored The Meadow: Terrorism, Kidnapping and Conspiracy in Paradise, about the abduction of six foreign tourists in Kashmir in 1995 by Masood Azhar’s previous group Harkat-ul-Ansar.

A massive ensemble cast enacts events that occur simultaneously in different places. The hijacking plot is hatched in Kathmandu. In Delhi, negotiations ensue, even as the news media starts chasing the story. In Kandahar, the hijackers have discussions with a visiting Indian team under the watchful eyes of the Taliban (Jordan stood in for the Afghan city).

The actors include Vijay Varma as Devi Sharan, Patralekhaa Paul as one of the air-hostesses, and Rajiv Thakur, Diljohn and Harminder Singh as the main hijackers. Pankaj Kapur plays the minister modelled on Jaswant Singh. The actors playing high-ranking security officers include Naseeruddin Shah, Arvind Swami, Manoj Pahwa, Kumud Mishra, Dibyendu Bhattacharya and Aditya Srivastava.

Anupam Tripathi plays a Research and Analysis Wing operative in Kathmandu racing against time to dig up information about the hijackers’ antecedents. Dia Mirza and Amrita Puri portray journalists tracking the story.

“Any event like this is so much about the behavior of people from different walks of life, people in different chairs [positions] reacting differently to different intentions,” Anubhav Sinha said. “The chairs are occupied by different individuals. The chair wants something else and the human wants something else.”

When Sinha was invited by Netflix and producer Matchbox Shots to join the project, a basic screenplay was already in place. “Producer Sarita Patil and Trishant had worked on it for three years,” Sinha said. “The script was based on Devi Sharan’s book and was about what was going on inside the aircraft. Every time I read the script, I wanted to know what was happening out there [outside of the plane]. Trishant and I went in for a rewrite. I let my personal intrigue lead me into the writing. I took the viewpoint of a viewer.”

Naseeruddin Shah and Pankaj Kapur (brothers-in-law in real life) were among the last actors picked for the show. “When we were writing, the characters were growing and they were throwing faces at us,” Sinha recalled. “We have an amazing ensemble of actors. It’s not like there is one actor per episode – all of them are there throughout.”

Intricate planning went into recreating 1999, of which few traces remain. “We were dealing with five different airports, an airport in Kandahar with a unique terrain, an aircraft that isn’t in operation, at least in India,” Sinha explained. “The production design was about being transparent and not coming in the way of the narrative. I must express my gratitude towards Dipen Bhavsar, the VFX supervisor, Vivek Dey, the VFX producer, and production design Sumit Basu.”

Extensive visual effects were unleashed on the handsomely produced show. “Hundreds of kids worked in dark rooms for months and months,” Sinha said. “I am very hard-nosed about saying yes to a shot, but they kept surprising me every day. It has become so intermingled that I can’t tell the difference between practical shots and visual effects shots.”

Numerous sequences take place in closed spaces – the plane, the war room in Delhi, the newsroom, an interrogation chamber in Kathmandu. Sinha’s conversations with cinematographers Ewan Mulligan and Ravi Kiran Ayyagari involved ensuring that these scenes were distinct from one another.

“Ewan and I knew that we were cutting constantly between various interiors, so we found ways to make them look different, whether in terms of set design or the way they were shot or graded later,” Sinha said. “We were aware that this was a problem, so a lot of discussions went into turning these scenes into something artistic.”