Karan Tejpal isn’t buying it. He shrinks away at the suggestion that Stolen is a lot like a Michael Haneke film.
But that’s not insincere fawning. His debut directorial feature that has created the FOMO moment of the year on streaming, is a lot about revelations. The layered nature of truth, that elusive concept, unfolds spectacularly in the Amazon Prime Video film that dropped on streaming last week. Starring Abhishek Banerjee (Gautam) and Shubham Vardhan (Raman) as two brothers who embark upon a dangerous quest in the dead of the night to find a migrant worker's (Jhumpa, played by Mia Maelzer) baby, abducted by a local racket, Stolen explores misinformation, mob violence and societal extremes with a nuance that's rare in the mainstream landscape.
After premiering at Venice Film Festival 2023, winning accolades at Beijing International Film Festival, Skip City International D-Cinema Festival in Japan and Zurich Film Festival, the film has topped charts in Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, the UK and the US, among other parts of the world. The film was executive-produced by Anurag Kashyap, Kiran Rao, Nikkhil Advani and Vikramaditya Motwane—all renowned names in the Hindi space.
Esquire India sat down with the team for a chat to understand how Stolen was made—from headhunting first-timers for technical departments to improvising its most striking one-take sequence, and a lot else.
Excerpts from the conversation:
I didn't really start out seeing one character as negative or the other as a ‘kind’ soul. They did what they were called to do in life. So, with a lot of people holding that it’s got a social message, I’d instead want to believe that meaning making has got little to do with the nature of revelation that you set out to do. Thoughts?
Karan: Preachiness is the death knell of any film. All this message making and all that is the takeaway of the viewer. We wanted to tell the story of these characters, this phenomenon. A story that's exciting. The message within comes across, or why you take it away, is because of the world that is created; any world should have enough of a 360-degree give and take in. It was partially planned and partially natural to the storytelling process that we followed.
Gaurav: It was a conscious decision to show both these sides and show them in extremity, the two Indias that we often talk about. On one hand are these brothers, going for the wedding of their mother—obviously implying remarried. And the other side was representing the people who we call the mob. But why do they become a mob? The very mob that comes to kill Gautam, comes in the end to help him get this baby. You can't call the mob stupid.
You can say they don't have trust. When they lose trust in the system, they take matters in their own hands. They know that nobody is going to come and help them. So, they have to help themselves. And we, as KT said, are presenting something and a lot of people are going to take a lot of different kinds of interpretations of of what they feel. Everybody will feel slightly unique about their experience.
But some people will align with Jhumpa, some people align with Gautam, some will align with Raman. So that for me is a sign. And we realised this pretty early on that the audience is going to keep shifting between from the first to the second, and then the third, and then back to first.
I think it's more of an interrogation of concepts like 'truth' and 'courage'.
Karan Tejpal: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Abhishek, you bring a lot of sensory and physical detail, a lot of body language to your characters. This character shows off money and can't be bothered beyond a certain point about Jhumpa's plight, but he's not an outright asshole. He feels deeply for his brother, but he also has a bit of a temper. But you do not caricature anything. Does having been a casting director help with externality of objectivity?
Yeah, I've always said that casting has always helped me understand the brief. Because that was my job—to understand the brief and execute it in audition rooms, and make actors act. So now, whenever somebody throws a script at me—or discusses a character—I usually get what they want me to do.
In Stolen, I knew they wanted me to just play this guy and not make him a character. So, that's why I think Gautam has been the most like one of the few parts which is from completely like closest to me. The other parts that I've played, the more mainstream ones, are very far away from me—I'm nothing like them.
Maybe I was like Jana (in the Stree franchise) when I was a child, even if not to that extreme. I used some of my childhood for that. And I like using my life wherever I can. For this present character, he was like the boy who, say, I've seen many in Delhi. They don't mean any harm, they're nice. His is the kind of vice upper middle-class boys would have. Otherwise, they're nice, they're respectful.
So, Gautam is also very liberal and open minded. He has no issues with his mom getting married. He's supporting her. In fact, the younger brother who seems to be not very sure of this wedding. So, he's a very nice, caring guy who is irritated with his younger brother because he's trying to do something completely offbeat. And that's how you would protect your family.
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During my watching of the film, when the whole chase goes south and Raman is grievously injured, even my first impulse was to curse the character. Like, 'Why did the dunce even get into this?'
Abhishek: For a long time, that was my biggest issue with the script, when they came to me. KT used to always say, 'Why won't anyone help?' But it's not that easy. You know, that's not how everybody works. And, so, it took me time to justify the fact that after his brother is safe, finally, when he's fallen so bad, he wants to rise a little. The actual, empathetic side of Gautam, comes out in the last 10 minutes of the film. Before that, he's just completely confused. He tells so much about us as people.
Gaurav: It's such a weird thing that this is the reality of the world we live in today. I've gotten so many messages where somebody says, 'Thank heavens that the baby was found in the end, and you were okay, otherwise, I would have wanted to kill the younger brother (Raman)'. It just shows our collective psyche towards crisis—how do we handle them, whether we want to handle a crisis on the road.
Could the film be interpreted as a narrative experiment where it's about, you know, what happens when you disturb the matrix? Is it hinting that the social apparatus—law and order, class divide, misinformation—is ill-equipped for good Samaritanism?
Abhishek: Across the world, yeah.
Karan: I think it's hopefully the opposite. Yes, there are challenges, but good can only come if we change that viewpoint.
Abhishek: About law and order, I think it was a masterstroke when Pandit Ji (the chief police officer) tries to come and help, he tries arguing with the mob. That's what it truly tries to depict—that no system or law and order can do anything, if we, the society, don't start fostering empathy or thoughtfulness. So, it's easy to blame the establishment, but the thing about Stolen is that there are two sides of the world and the system is caught in between. That, too, is something that I probably started thinking when I watched it as an audience member. It's not that the police do not have emotions—but are we allowing them to have any emotions? If they're directed to implement crowd control, do people start forcing their hand in any way? We need to think about that.
Karan: A lot of it was derived from research and during that we learnt that sometimes, with a mob lynching situation, even the police cannot do much. There have been instances where the police wanted to help but couldn't, because in the face of such numbers and such anger, they are powerless. We also built it up from a real-world simulation of how things actually play out.
Abhishek: I've seen a situation in Kumbh, where different state police were operating along with the central police to manage that kind of crowd. I was feeling very bad for the crowd, and those guys are like, breaking barricades and stuff. So, I don't know who to blame in a situation like this. Eventually, in the film it's the same mob that comes and saves Gautam.
Gaurav: When we started developing it, we realised very early on that the very underlining layer of the film is loss of trust. And it can be triggering—what you see in the film is that people don't trust each other anymore, and also partly because of the amount of information that exists. With cellphones and internet, everything has become about being self-centered. People don't like to share, or to get into other's business. They would rather be into their phones than anywhere else.
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I was watching The Studio, and it explores a whole conversation between art and commerce, between films and movies, like Sal Saperstein puts it. With all the buzz around Stolen, and independent films receiving decreasing attention, how do you view lack of enthusiastic funding, lack of screens for movies that might not fulfill the big-screen spectacle mold? What does it mean to be an independent film producer right now in the Indian context?
Gaurav: You have to roll up your sleeves and be ready for a fight. At the financing level, this was an extremely, risky proposition, where when we started, we wanted to shoot a one-take film.
I knew nobody's going to find that with a first time director who wants to go crazy with his characters. And how he wants to really get this impact and get what you see now. So, it was very clear that I need to do this myself, and very, very soon. But it was a smaller budget at the time, and then the pandemic happened—we had to stop. We couldn't shoot that one-take.
And as the film sort of progressed, we started developing it further, getting feedback from a lot of people across the world: writers, producers, sales companies in the US, in India. We got a lot of people to give us [feedback], because our vision was to make a global film, from the very beginning. And that's what Jungle Book Studio, my company's been doing.
Since we needed inputs from people across the world, that experience was hard, too, because we put a lot of effort—KT, me and another writer—and they would trash it. They would really like some things—for instance, the spine of it. And then, it was hard for us to create Jhumpa. Because Gautam and Raman is something that we were; as in, we are Gautam and Raman—they could come from our own experiences. But Jhumpa's experience was very unique and we had a hard time writing that.
ESQ: How did you manage it then?
Gaurav: Mia put in a lot of work, going to meet surrogate mothers and spending time with them, understanding why they do what they do. These women spend the nine months in a hostel together, and it happens across India, from Gujarat to West Bengal. She went to these places, spent time with these women and she realised a lot of the feelings associated with it all cannot be vocalised. It is all, so to speak, under the breath. She can't go out because it's illegal.
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ESQ: The sequence where Gautam is almost lynched by the angry mob really got me. He's finally cornered, dragged around and beaten up. It's affecting and viscerally scary even in the way it's shot. The camera moves very close to Abhishek, it's right into the viewer's face, with members of the mob thrashing him with flip-flops and brooms. Walk me through that whole sequence.
Abhishek: I think it’s completely a production and direction question. I just needed to react to the mob.
Gaurav: No, it wasn't that simple, of course. And that jhadoo wali woman, Abhishek got from the crowd and told her, 'Aap mujhe jhadoo maarna'. It was this one take that had to be coordinated in a manner that these thousands of people who are in it and watching from their balconies and from their terraces, are synchronised in what we are doing and add to what we are doing and behave in the manner that we would like to. It was hard to do that.
I remember the third take—the final one—where this plank that hits Abhishek (it is also in the trailer) was supposed to be one of the fake ones that you make for these purposes. But the last one that was used wasn't so fake. They forgot to replace it, and it was actually either real or a much harder one. And it translated into a proper blow. So, if you look at his reaction—it actually communicates that very real feeling. KT and I remember talking to him after we shot that sequence. Abhishek was smoking with me, and told me. 'I'm horrified because I really felt that I was being lynched, purely because that thing was so real'. He was quite shaken that night.
Abhishek: It was the peak of helplessness, and that scene is really the peak of helplessness.
Karan: But in my limited experience at this stage, I have never seen like reality and acting sort of become one. The way Abhishek was in that scene, where he and Gautam both became one, it was genuinely a very emotional moment for him.