NewsX was recently joined by Siddharth Anand Kumar, vice-president, Films and Events, Saregama India Ltd, for an exclusive conversation as a part of its special series, NewsX A-List where he spoke about his production house and the film industry.
Talking about the film division of Saregama, Kumar said, “The film producing division of Saregama, which is India’s oldest music label, has the most incredible and rich catalogue of music. Going back to the early days, pretty much every song which belongs to our childhoods, the feeling of nostalgia and the great kind of cinema that we have created overall in these years reside in Saregama. Yoodlee is Saregama’s attempt to have a participation in the making of movies and not just in the music of movies. So, we started out cautiously, slowly to establish the fact that filmmaking can be a profitable venture.”
Kumar added, “Filmmaking is not necessarily something that is ruled only by mavericks who are willing to take big risks, and in a win-all or lose-all situation, to bring some sort of corporate method to the madness of cinema. It’s quite a tall order but that is what we’ve taken on ourselves. It’s been about three and a half years that Yoodlee has been fully operational. I think the first film was released in October 2017, under the banner. Since then, we have produced around 20 films, out of which I think 14 are already out and have hit consumers, the rest are being completed and will reach consumers soon. We have 10 films on Netflix, 3 out of which are Netflix Originals. We have 3 films on Hotstar and 1 film on Zee5. So, we’ve been participants in the beginning of the OTT wave. We have been producing feature films, largely for OTT platforms. We’ve done this in multiple languages, in Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, English and Hindi. We’ve also along the process won two National Awards for a movie called Hamid, one of my favourite movies. Our films have been to over 80 international festivals at the time when we actually had on-ground festivals and not online festivals, sounds like another era now, but these things did happen. So, it’s been a very interesting journey of us really scaling up story-led cinema and that is what Yoodlee is based on”.
Speaking about 2020, the pandemic and how the year turned out for him, Kumar said, “I can’t complain, I see all the memes floating around and everyone saying corona has been terrible for them and I have many friends whose businesses and workplaces have been impacted very badly. Somehow, I think fortuitously or by design our company has escaped the worst of it. We are largely a provider to OTT platforms, the Yoodlee part of the business. That has been that part of the industry has been thriving. I don’t think there’s been necessarily a slowdown. We have produced 3 feature films already in corona during the lockdown.”
Kumar went on to say, “We have released 3 feature films, so 2 of these films were films that were going to go theatrical which we were quick on the bandwagon and managed to avoid the theatrical route, when we realised there was no light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak and 2 films went on to Netflix, one was called ‘Akoni’, which is a beautiful little film, a comedy about racism, the other one was another comedy called ‘Chaman Bahaar’, which was about one-sided love in a small town of India in the 1990s. It’s been amazing that the last year we’ve worked with talents like Sayani Gupta, Sanjay Mishra, Ram Kapoor, Jitu. So, very interesting people who have found it worthwhile to collaborate with us. I think that’s a good sign of things to come.”
Talking about regional cinema, he said, “One of the three films we’ve completed during the pandemic is a film I’m extremely fond of—Zombievilli—it’s a comedy about a zombie outbreak in Dondeville, which is a suburb of Mumbai. It’s a funny take on zombie films. It has got what I consider the best possible cast and crew assembled in Marathi cinema. We have Amey Wagh, who’s a highly successful and well-respected actor. We have Lalit Prabhaskar, another shining star, a young man who is rising very rapidly in Marathi cinema. We have Pashuram Vaidehi, who’s the actress and we have Aditya Sarpotdar, who’s a very accomplished, experienced director of big hit films in the Marathi language. Action comedies are generally harder to make than dramas in the pandemic, because you have fight masters, stuntmen, and a large number of extras on a set. Everyone needs to get tested, things have to move a lot slower than they usually would. None of us know this, we’ve learned on the job, essentially, how to handle Covid and get our work done.”
Speaking about the impact of the pandemic on the industry, Kumar talked about a few emerging trends. “The film industry is always going to thrive because it is run by entrepreneurial people who are go-getters. So, I think filmmakers are the people I would trust to get me out of a tight situation because jugaad is inherent to filmmaking. I don’t think filmmaking will get affected. I think what we’re seeing is a re-examination of a lot of the old notions that we held.”