National Award-winning director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s latest film Lost, about a journalist’s search for a missing person, is getting a lot of views on ZEE5. We caught up with Aniruddha on how Lost came to be, casting Yami Gautam in the lead role of a crime reporter and the values that the film upholds.

Lost is inspired by real-life stories

My writer Shyamal Sengupta had written a story about the murder of a reporter. I was working on the storyline for sometime. Later, I got introduced to a crime reporter through a friend of mine. She was a young journalist. I spoke to her. She was young, energetic and fearless. But she did not look like an activist. Suddenly a story started cooking up in my head. Shyamal and I started working on the idea. Slowly, Lost was born.

Instead of making Lost completely in the thriller genre, I decided to keep the thrill element in the background and focus more on humanity. Loving, helping and understanding each other, integrity, commitment and affection are important elements. This is a kind of propaganda film. Propaganda for love and commitment. The film is inspired from a lot of real-life stories.

There was a spark in Yami Gautam’s eyes

The script discovers the actor. After reading the script with our producers and collaborators, we started deciding on the cast. We took a lot of suggestions from each member of our team. Our casting director Jogi Malang helped us in the process. We met Yami Gautam and spoke to her. There was a spark in her eyes. She loved the story.

It is very important that the person you’re collaborating with likes the story. The strength of Vidhi Sahani, the character Yami plays, is within. You don’t have to be an activist to become a strong woman. Vidhi is a regular woman. She has her desires. She is beautiful. She’s affectionate. She’s kind-hearted. At the same time she’s extremely strong. Her strength is in her mind. It’s not in her body. This is something Vidhi reflects. Less is more. You don’t have to fight and shout to make a point and prove yourself. You can do it by being silent. Yami has that strength. She can explain a lot of things through her eyes and I feel she has been able to portray that properly.

(L-R) Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury with Yami Gautam. Instagram

The grandfather-granddaughter bond in Lost

Lost talks about values. As far as my perception goes, we tend to imbibe values from our grandparents. And nothing can replace the warmth and love, friendship and the non-compromising attitude of grandparents. I wanted the bond between Vidhi and her grandfather to be solid.

Pankaj Kapur’s strength of delivery and dedication to a character is huge. He performs with his whole body. Pankaj Kapur and Yami are like real-life grandfather and granddaughter in Lost. I had asked them to follow the script.

Casting Rahul Khanna, Pia Bajpiee and Tushar Pandey

We have a stereotype of a politician, of someone having paan and tobacco, and we portray them in a very bad way. I did not want to do that. I had seen Rahul Khanna in the series The Americans, where he had a very small role, and I liked his appearance. I felt Rahul would be a good choice. We started talking. At first, Rahul refused the role. I convinced him. I said, ‘You are Al Pacino from Godfather’. Then he liked the script. He’s such an erudite, polite human being.

Our casting director Jogi recommended Pia Bajpiee. In our first meeting with Pia, we knew she is exactly who we wanted as Ankita. Ankita is a small-town girl from UP. She has seen a lot of struggles in life. She wants to achieve something and she is ready to compromise for it. She has her own philosophy. She has her needs like others. We felt Pia would be the right person for it.

Tushar Pandey, who plays Ishaan, is a theatre actor. He had worked with me in Pink. He has the characteristics of a regular boy. We needed that for Ishaan’s character.

Kolkata as a character

I was actually planning to shoot Lost in Lucknow. But in terms of the visuals and politics, I felt shooting in Kolkata would be the best place. There are a lot of elements of Kolkata that we wanted to explore. We shot during Covid when people were moving around in masks. When we were taking long shots, all that was getting exposed. To control everyone became very difficult. That was a physical challenge.

Two challenging scenes

There are two scenes that are close to my heart. One is where Vidhi is having a conversation with her boyfriend Neel. Neel says, ‘Why are you so upset with a Dalit guy? A Dalit boy became a maoist… It happens all the time. An ordinary person is missing.’ To which Vidhi says, ‘Everyone is a human being. Every eight minutes a child goes missing in India. What do you mean by Dalits? Aren’t they humans like you and me?’

The second scene is a confrontation between Vidhi and Ankita. After Ankita wins the election, she says, ‘Who doesn’t want to stay good? Everyone does. Everyone compromises for that.’ These two scenes are very powerful in the film. Representing the scenes visually was definitely a challenge.

On the cinematography and editing

Avik Mukhopadhyay is one of the coolest cinematographers. We have a very good understanding. He had shot Pink. We have done almost 200-300 ad films together. Avik knows exactly what I want. Before every film, we have discussions on the colour, mood, shots and visuals.

The film was edited fantastically by Bodhaditya Banerjee. I always ask my editors to do the first cut because I don’t want to interfere in their creativity. I shoot the film according to the script. After Bodhaditya edited the first cut, I gave my inputs and then we did the final edit.

On the songs

Shantanu Moitra and I have worked together for a long time. My brief to Shantanu was that we wanted to get into the mindspace of the characters. Shantanu has done the sound very subtly; it’s not over the top. He understood the drama and it absolutely complemented the drama. The songs in Lost are very poetic.