Shridhar Raghavan

We bring up Ian Fleming, the British writer we believe created the trope of the female handler (head of the Secret Intelligence Service, M) and the suave male spy (James Bond), which is also a theme in Pathaan. We discuss the relationship between Dimple Kapadia and SRK, and Shridhar brings up Peter O’ Donnell’s Modesty Blaise. “They must have existed at the same time. She was the female Bond, you could say.”

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This conversation is now all over the place. We are talking books, movies, graphic novels, not just the script he is being interviewed for. And  we start to get the beautiful mess that’s inside his mind. As Haruki Murakami calls it, “a cabinet”, it seems filled with fragments of all a writer knows, which he rummages through to make his new creation. If we have any qualms about the movie—the fact that the background score seems “inspired” by the theme music of The Mandalorian composed by Ludwig Goransson, or elements of production design like the lab within a snow-capped mountain, which is reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, we don’t care anymore. We are being entertained, just as we were in front of the big screen. 

Now that we know where Shridhar comes from, we ask him about the research involved. “I never rely on the Internet. For this movie, which is more like an entertaining graphic novel, I knew enough already. If you want to know more, you pick up the phone and call someone, like a journalist or a service person, and say, ‘Give me some insight’.”

The bigger challenge was to make this movie fit into the Yashraj top boss Aditya Chopra’s vision of his production company’s spy verse, which includes War (2019) and Tiger Zinda Hai (2017). “When I came on board, during War, Siddharth [Anand] had a story, the key characters, and the conflict, all in place. I added my take, and it went well. During the time, they were talking about Pathaan. They had been wanting to do a movie with Mr Khan for long. We were thinking if post-COVID, it will be a biological war film. But it was never going to be utterly serious. We went with what Hitchcock would call the MacGuffin, the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. ‘In crook stories, it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers’. The process was amazing. We were drafting the story board, and adding structure and managed to get a lot of time with Mr Khan. It’s very rare for an actor to do this. Siddharth [Anand, director] wanted a spectacle, so we incorporated that. The action film watcher wants pace and momentum. I entered the team as a movie watcher too. The plot is just one part of it; the characters and moments remain with you for long—a line of dialogue, which Abbas [Tyrewala, co-writer] is great at. It was not black versus white. We had to make it equal. The stronger the villain, the greater the hero.”

It worked. At last count, the film had collected Rs 729 crore globally (in 10 days). What’s next for the spy verse? “We have got a few characters—which the audience knows, and are unique. One way to go will be to create more adventures with them, and there may be organic crossovers as well. We will also create new characters. Some of them who you saw the last of, may emerge again. The idea is to play around.”