How Vikramaditya Motwane Created the World of Jubilee

Halfway into Jubilee, created by Vikramaditya Motwane and Soumik Sen, there’s a scene in which the aspiring director Jay Khanna (a luminous Sidhant Gupta) finds that the introduction that his friend Niloufer (a spunky Wamiqa Gabbi) had organised with film financier Walia (Ram Kapoor)  is not to land Jay a film, but to be Walia’s driver. Fuming and frustrated, the recently out-of-work Jay takes the job — mostly because it lets him take Niloufer on a drive. “Yeh Walia jaisa toota-foota aadmi tumhe khush kaise rakhta hai (How does a sleaze like Walia make you happy)?” Jay asks Niloufer, looking at her in his rearview mirror, while driving her to an audition. “Khushi unki zarurat hai, jo unhe mujhse mil jaati hai. Meri zarurat hai… paisa”(He’s the one looking for happiness, which he gets from me. I’m just looking for money).” So far, so scripted. Then Gabbi does something unexpected. She rolls the word ‘paisa’ around — “Payysa, paisaa!” — stressing on different vowels, tossing the word out with a typically Bombay street slant. It’s a remarkable moment that shows Niloufer’s irreverence and also hints at her range. From the cloistered, elite spaces of the mujra to the smoky Mumbai bar to streetsmart slang, she can slip into it all. After that, Niloufer asks Jay to run her lines while they’re driving.  The scene they’re reading is a typical damsel-in-distress situation from a Hindi film of the Fifties. Gupta – who is usually uncluttered and free-flowing through most of his lines as Jay – takes an adequate number of awkward pauses to show he’s reading the lines for the first time. The performance is reminiscent of Aamir Khan’s similar scene in Rangeela (1995). Gabbi hams the hell out of the scene in the backseat of the car,  like the star she knows she is. When Jay comments that she’s playing it too “filmy”, she shoots back with “Film mein filmy na karoon toh kya karoon? (Should I not make it filmy in a literal film?)” She plays around with the lines, reading them in the dry monotone of a radio news presenter, and soon, both she and Jay have burst out in a fit of giggles. 

It’s a fantastic scene that showcases all the strengths of the show – two promising newcomers, striking cinematography, a distinctive directorial vision and writing that’s sharp, and modern but also appropriate for the era. The way Gupta and Gabbi change gears between different styles of acting; the way Motwane and cinematographer Pratik Shah block the scenes through different angles thanks to at least four different set-ups, timing Gupta’s reaction-shots to perfection; the way writer Atul Sabharwal’s dialogues never feel cumbersome: Jubilee works like a well-oiled machine in scenes like these.

Jubilee is a cocktail of fact and fiction, handled with grace by a stellar ensemble cast that includes newcomers like Gupta and Gabbi, and also stars like Prosenjit Chatterjee, who plays Srikant Roy, a studio owner modelled on Himanshu Rai, and Aditi Rao Hydari, whose Sumitra Kumari has many shades of the legendary actor Devika Rani. Aparshakti Khurana plays Binod Das, who is modelled on Kumudlal Ganguly,  a lab assistant at Rai’s Bombay Talkies, who would go on to become the beloved screen icon, Ashok Kumar. Similarly, when Binod finally gets his break, he’s rechristened, Madan Kumar. The 10-part Amazon series is filled with Easter eggs that will delight a Hindi film nerd, but the show is more than a trivia round. It works because of how it plays out as a drama, independent of the nods to Hindi cinema’s history. 

Motwane’s Amazon original is his second show for OTT platforms after Netflix shut down Sacred Games following an underwhelming second season. Jubilee is set in a time period close to that of another project where Motwane was a co-producer, director Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet (2015). Did he revisit the sets of the film before starting prep on the Amazon show? “We did visit the Bombay Velvet sets, just to see if we could use it, but then ultimately decided to build our own,” said Motwane. “Also, I think I’m a bit more VFX-friendly than Anurag was during Velvet. I know how much we can build, and how much can be realised in the post. Anurag wanted it all to be built. He wasn’t sure it would look immersive enough.” 

Motwane has another link to the era. His grandfather produced a film titled Andolan (1951) that failed at the time and which Motwane drew on when naming his own production company, Andolan Films. The 1951 film is briefly mentioned as an under-production film in Jubilee, which began in the corridors of the erstwhile Phantom Films, as a five-page treatment on the ‘golden age of Hindi cinema’ (widely regarded as the Forties and Fifties). Writer-director Atul Sabharwal came to write the pilot of the show and went on to write all 10 episodes (he has a co-writer in the last episode), which is unusual for a show of this magnitude. Similarly, instead of parcelling episodes off to multiple directors, Motwane helmed all 10 episodes of the show. “Just like Jay and Binod talk about making a movie about movies, even Vikram and I go back a long way. Most of our conversations back-and-forth as writers, directors and producers have made it into Jubilee,” said Sabharwal. 

One of the first scenes in the show, in which Binod is carrying prints of a film on his bicycle to a cinema, is inspired from Motwane’s own life. When he was an assistant on Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas (2002), he’d been privy to a secret: Someone from the distributor's office had to cycle to the New Excelsior theatre with the film’s premiere prints. “Just the day before Devdas’s premiere, we were discussing how Mughal-E-Azam’s prints had arrived on an elephant. Somehow Devdas’s prints landed on a bicycle. Sanjay doesn’t know this story otherwise he would’ve fired somebody,” said Motwane. 

Sabharwal said that instead of reading up on the history of Indian cinema, he went back to rewatch some of his favourite films from those early decades: “There was Gyan Mukherjee’s Kismet (1943), Guru Dutt’s Mr and Mrs 55 (1955), Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), Mehboob Khan’s Roti (1942), Andaz (1949), Dev Anand’s Taxi Driver (1954), Jaali Note (1960), Pocket Maar (1956) and Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal (1949).” The climax of Mukherjee’s Sangram (1950) – starring Ashok Kumar – became the source for the Madan Kumar monologue that looms like a ghost over the show. Sabharwal also read about the socio-political circumstances and geopolitics of that time, which allowed him to wield it as per his convenience without being caged by trivia. “I tried to make an informed guess,” said Sabharwal, “about the circumstances that birthed the movies of that time.”

In contrast, Motwane chose not to revisit old movies because he didn’t want them to dictate his visual style. He did, however, establish certain ground rules for himself, like no hand-held shots. “For example, the moment where Maqsood visits Binod in the studio, and then Maqsood meets Sumitra as Binod looks on, it’s a very noir moment,” said Motwane. “I didn’t want to get too caught up in how these moments were created in the films of that era.” For some specific sequences, however, Motwane did go back to the old movies to see how the dolly worked, how they operated the cranes, and what were the overall limitations to filmmaking in that era. “How did Raj Kapoor shoot ‘Ghar Aaya Pardesi’ and how Guru Dutt shot ‘Hum Aapki Aankhon Mein’. Also, a scene from Kaagaz Ke Phool (1960) where they shot Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman in a car,” said the director, listing some of Hindi cinema’s most unforgettable moments.

There are subtle hat-tips to these vintage eras and Jubilee’s cast does a remarkable job of bringing these to life in the show. Casting Khurana as Binod, who rises to become one of Jubilee’s two leading men, is a brave casting choice because of his unconventional looks. Two of Motwane’s biggest gambles were on Gupta and Gabbi, and both hit the jackpot. Remembering their auditions, Motwane said Gupta showed a “fire” almost as soon as he entered the audition room that lent itself to Jay Khanna. Gabbi came to Niloufer in a more roundabout route. “We’d done an audition with her, and I’d cast someone else,” recalled Motwane. “Then the pandemic happened and we stopped shooting. I went back to the auditions and what simultaneously happened is I joined Instagram for an interview because all of that was happening online. I found Wamiqa’s account and saw she was really funny on Instagram. So, as much as I saw that Niloufer was a character, who is poised on the surface, I saw how Wamiqa could bring a sense of fun and chhichhoriness (sass) to her.” The paisa scene is a case in point. 

Not just the primary cast members, there’s meticulousness and attention paid to secondary cast members too. Take, for instance, the character of Asghar Ali (played by Vikas Shukla) – who smokes furiously inside a screening room, thinking about how his passion project is about to be gutted by the studio head — who could have been a throwaway character but feels important to Jubilee despite his limited screen time. “I think any character that’s ending up on your script or screen, they’re all equals,” said Sabharwal. “Whether it’s the bus conductor, the cobbler or goons in the refugee camp. I think if they don’t work, your primary characters won’t work.” Sabharwal said he picked this up from Salim-Javed, who would write excellent characters for roles that appeared in just one or two scenes. Motwane maintained that ‘secondary characters can’t be given “secondary lines”, and said they’re the trickiest parts to cast. “You can’t just ignore that [part of casting]. For example, you needed that cobbler to be played by someone with very kind eyes,” said Motwane, referring to a scene in which an out-of-luck Jay is shown kindness by a stranger on Bombay’s streets. 

For the show’s excellent music, Motwane brought back his regulars – Amit Trivedi for the songs and Alokananda Dasgupta for the score. They’re both triumphs, as Trivedi lands his second consecutive project after Qala where he’s channelling his tribute to a vintage era. But it’s Dasgupta’s shining moment again after Sacred Games – where she employs cellos, violins, and harps to communicate the stakes at the end of each episode. “With Aloka – the only rule we had in place was that the melodies could be modern,” said Motwane, “but the instrumentation shouldn’t be.”

While Motwane sought to create a distinctively vintage tonality to his storytelling, one of Sabharwal’s challenges was to navigate between three versions of the Hindi language while writing Jubilee’s dialogues: “The film within the film, how characters speak in their real life, and how film people speak to each other in general, which is usually very anecdotal.” Sabharwal gave an example of how film people usually talk to each other in daily life – “If a Vishesh film does average business, you won’t hear Mukesh Bhatt saying ‘the film did average business’. He’ll say something like ‘Naa hi mahal banaa, naa jhopda jalaa (Neither did it leave behind a palace, nor did it leave us homeless)’.” It’s a flourish that we hear in both Walia and Roy’s lines, like when Roy declares “Waqt ki kya aukaat ke woh Roy se aagey nikal jaaye (Time would never dare to leave Roy behind)!” In Sabharwal’s imagination, it’s possible Roy had read a similar line in a film script, but he’s able to articulate it in a real-life situation because he’s lived with such lines for his whole life.

What’s a trick to remember while writing about the film industry? “I think the intent is to write a good drama, you know?” Sabharwal said, while going on to add a note that the action director Sham Kaushal gave him during his directorial debut, Aurangzeb (2013). “He (Kaushal) told me to forget I was making a double-role movie, and told me to treat the two characters (of Arjun Kapoor) as different characters. I think it’s handy advice for everything you set out to do.” Motwane agreed. “You can have all the inside jokes, references and stories, but only when you tell it through the medium of a good drama, will the audience come along for the ride.”

Jubilee is streaming on Prime Video.