Vikramaditya Motwane is one of the few Indian filmmakers who've hopped as many genres in their filmography. He debuted with Udaan (2010), a coming-of-age film, did a romantic drama in Lootera (2013), followed it up with an escape thriller Trapped (2016), and a vigilante movie, Bhavesh Joshi Superhero (2018). His releases on streaming haven't been any less diverse – a crime thriller in Sacred Games, a fact-fiction black comedy in AK vs AK (2020), and a period workplace drama in Jubilee (2023). It's no surprise then that his new movie, CTRL, is Hindi cinema's maiden screenlife thriller.

Vikramaditya on his diverse filmography

“Maybe that also comes from rebelling against typecasting, which started happening a little bit after Udaan,” Vikramaditya says in an exclusive interview. “People started offering me family films or films with kids. And I was like, ‘Nahi yaar, nahi karna hai (No, don't want to do this).' Once you've rebelled against that and said I'm going to make a love story (Lootera), then you want to keep doing that all your life,” he adds. He also attributes the genre-hopping to his love for all kinds of cinema and storytelling.

“I just love every kind of movie – Hindi commercial movies, art films, genre films – I'm a big fan of experimental films and series. So when you're a fan of all kinds of cinema, then you also want to be able to do all of it. Why restrict yourself to a certain kind of thing,” says Vikramaditya, who also doesn't want to limit himself to the same people he works with. “A lot of it comes from the fact that if it's not challenging to you, then what's the point of even doing it? You adopt a new family every year, year and a half. Might as well make it worthwhile for everybody, might as well learn something along the way, and have fun doing it. So I've always cherished every filmmaking experience I've had,” he says.

On going screenlife

Vikramaditya hadn't exactly gotten over his fascination with pioneering screenlife movies from the West, like Levan Gabriadze's Unfriended (2014) and Aneesh Chaganty's Searching (2018), when Sharad Devarajan, the head of Graphic India, reached out asking him to make one of his own. A reunion with his AK vs AK screenwriter Avinash Sampath led to them coming up with CTRL, a story that starts out with a lover's quarrel and then evolves into something far more insidious.

Vikramaditya, 47, was quite clear from the beginning that he wanted this film to be a collaborative effort. “I think the best thing I've done is to get Sumukhi Suresh to write the dialogues and Ananya Panday to star in it, because they're more in it than I am. It was a very collaborative effort. Knowing that I don't want to be the one in his 40s telling 20-year-olds how to work the internet. I don't know it, so I'm going to get (the right) people,” he says.

However, Ananya feels Vikramaditya is quite with it when it comes to the "meme culture." She reveals that bringing digital sensations like Tanmay Bhat, Rohan Joshi, and Yashraj Mukhate onboard for a key sequence was his brainchild. Since most screenlife thrillers out there hail from the West, he also had the task of making the film reflective of the extremely peculiar Indian internet culture. “It took a lot of research. A lot of hours of watching… a lot of hours wasted watching (laughs)… on the internet about influencers, comments, how things work," Vikramaditya says.

On visual design

Vikramaditya feels the toughest aspect of CTRL wasn't the research, but the technical execution. “You don't realise it, but every single thing has to be created on that desktop. We had to create the operating system, new versions of Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, whatever. Not only that, you've to put all the videos inside, all the captions, all the numbers, all the comments. Every single suggestion has to be created and vetted by legal. All that stuff is very time-consuming and a lot of hard work. And you want it to be unique, you want it to be different. You don't want it to be like anything else done before,” he says.

He also had to design probably the second most crucial character of the movie – Allen, the Artificial Intelligence avatar that Ananya's protagonist Nella interacts with. Memorable AI characters have infused life into films like Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2014), but Vikramaditya didn't want to go all “boutique” on his AI like those films. “We came up with the character from the perspective of what would it be if a mass market company decided to put a product like CTRL into the mass market. Hey guys, here's an app that can do all the things for you – it can be your social media manager, it can erase your past, it has a friend-philosopher-guide who can talk to you. If you do that, then you'd have to make it broader. Which is why the options of choosing the personality type. Allen is, of course, the comic flirt, but there's also a science geek etc," says Vikramaditya.

Limitations of screenlife

Vikramaditya admits that he and Avinash had thought of a different ending in the first draft of the film – in which Nella goes for revenge. But given the nature and size of the beast she was fighting, they had to pick between sticking to the screenlife format or changing the original climax. “That's the moment we realised, why would anyone in that right mind stream this or shoot this, what would be the screenlife element? So very quickly, that went out of the window. It has to be organic to the story,” he says. Vikramaditya also confesses he enjoyed working within the limitation and making it his strength, instead of succumbing to it.

He even explored, and eventually rejected, the possibility of an interactive version of CTRL, on the lines of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018). “The writing process gives you such a headache because you have to compute all the possibilities,” he says. Could there be a sequel though? The one where Nella avenges, sans the screenlife format probably. “Maybe. I don't know. I don't buy into a sequel. I think in Nella's case, she's doomed. She's gone down that rabbit hole again," says Vikramaditya, laughing off the idea. He believes it's best to leave CTRL as a cautionary tale instead of extending it into a revenge saga.

What's next?

After CTRL, Vikramaditya has Indi(r)a's Emergency and prison drama Black Warrant in pipeline. Since the former is a documentary and the latter a show, he's likely to stay away from theatres for some more time now. His last theatrical release was Bhavesh Joshi Superhero back in 2018. “Theatrical is definitely on my mind. I think it's a lovely time for theatrical, especially in the genre space. It's the sort of space I love, like action. So I'm excited to see what happens there,” says Vikramaditya, switching off his Zoom screen.

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