Director Karan D Kapadia on Creating a Rallying Cry for Justice with Hunkkaar: The Roar

Karan D Kapadia and Nitya Mehra’s upcoming Hunkkaar: The Roar is the kind of project that intends to consume you till the very end of it. A while before the upcoming series got shaped into a visual treat, the team spent nearly a year in the writers’ room to keep it edgy. In addition to this, the makers also kept playing around names to find the right title till ‘Hunkkaar’ hit them like a thunderbolt! “It just slapped me in the face as a title,” says Karan as he opens up bringing a David Fincher-esque atmosphere of mounting dread and psychological trauma to life.

Spaking about the time when Hunkkaar started getting into shape, Karan says, “It actually happened parallelly with Big Girls Don’t Cry. Nitya (Mehra) and I had read an article about the subject matter and we knew this was a story that had to be told. I started developing it parallelly post-COVID through Big Girls. We were going to shoot it right after Big Girls…, which we ended up doing.”

When it comes to writing the part, Kapadia reveals it took him nearly a year to get it where he wanted. He says, “First I wrote the story out, and broke that into a beat sheet with the writers in the room. Then each writer took their episodes and worked on their drafts. It came back to me, I overwrote on that, and we repeated that process until we got to where I wanted in terms of tone and mentality.”

“The big dos and don’ts for me were staying away from any controversies vis-a-vis religion or anything like that. I wanted to stay closer to a problem in our country, which is the epidemic of rape. As a society, we need to address this together… it was a salute to the women of our country who are fighting the good fight. I didn’t want us to miss the woods for the trees— this is a David versus Goliath story about speaking your truth, no matter the consequences,” he adds.

Delving into the psychological tone of Hunkkaar, Kapadia reveals that the spectacle carries the tone and sense of dread and fear, and attempts to emulate what the protagonist’s state of mind is. Speaking of the legend, he says, “David Fincher does this really well in his work. I wanted to invoke this sense of paranoia in our characters — the desperation to seek justice before they are taken out or silenced, because the case had this angle of your life being in danger.”

From the set design, lightening to staging and performances, Kapadia wants a sense of eeriness that looms in the energy of the series. “The tone had to reflect the psychological journey and trauma of what our characters go through. We don’t really talk about the inner journey of trauma of victims in our country. When something like this happens, you have to relive this experience 14 or 15 times — telling a lawyer, a judge, an investigating officer, going through another medical report. The horror and trauma never leave you. It was very important to address the psychological effect of what this does to a human being when someone violates you without consent,” he explains.

“Also, this underdog story resonates greatly in the tone because it’s an out-of-work lawyer, a first-time police officer, and a 17-year-old girl in a family without the resources to take on an enemy that virtually has the power of a state. But the most important thing for me is that it’s a triumph of the human spirit. No matter how heavily stacked the odds are, there’s always hope, and we must never give in. That’s the lasting message of our show,” he adds.

Kapadia mentions that he was clear of casting Aneet Padda. “She was someone we knew had the talent,” he says while mentioning working with her on Big Girls Don’t Cry and on a short film before that. Mentioning about the short film, he says, “It’s a short that Nitya directed before this called Khatti Meethi Yaadein, which came out on the platform Waves. That’s actually the very first thing we did with her.”

The filmmaker further describes Aneet as an “organic actor” and “method-oriented.” “She builds up, prepares, and puts herself in that headspace way before we come to shoot. If we were shooting a crucial scene of her character’s testimony, she’d be sitting quietly brooding and actually imbibing what that character is thinking. As an artist, she’s phenomenal in her timing, delivery, and expression. The amount of emotional intelligence she brings to a scene, just with her eyes, says so much. You just have to add a couple of fine details and texturing here and there, and you’ve got it. Very often, she’d nail it in the first or second take. She comes from a school of artists where she forgets herself as a person and engulfs herself in the process.”

Even while speaking of Fatima Sana Shaikh, Kapadia praises her ability to let go of herself to disappear behind the character. The actress underwent an entire process of meeting a bunch of investigating officers, spending time with the police personnel and their family to understand the crux of what works and what does not, and ultimately, the way they approach their job. Overall, the filmmaker praises the entire cast for imbibing the method-esque approach towards their respective characters.

The courtroom drama is produced by Birla Studios and Applause Entertainment, in association with Priyanka Chopra’s production house, Purple Pebble Pictures, and Mangata Films Production. Directed by Karan D Kapadia and Nitya Mehra, Hunkkaar – The Roar is scheduled to stream on JioHotstar from September 25.