Killer Soup, a heady dark comedy that seamlessly blends the absurd and the real, is now streaming on Netflix. Powered by an ensemble cast led by Manoj Bajpayee (in a double role) and Konkona Sensharma, the series has been created, co-written and directed by Abhishek Chaubey, the man behind films like Ishqiya, Udta Punjab and the Netflix anthology Ray. A The Telegraph chat.

Killer Soup is a crazy rollercoaster ride. I know that the idea came from a newspaper headline. What made you want to make it?

This idea came to my writers first — Anant Tripathi, Unaiza Merchant and Harshad Nalawade. They had written some beats of the first episode and a basic idea of the story. Thereafter, we worked on it for two years. When you surf the Internet today or even read the newspaper, there are these weird headlines, but you don’t think about it and you move on. But if you pause and read what is written, it is fairly bizarre, especially the kind of crimes that are taking place. The kind committed not by professional criminals, but by amateurs.

The story of Killer Soup was one of those. We thought what if it doesn’t pan out the way it pans out in real life? In real life, mostly these crimes are uncovered in a matter of days. But what if it doesn’t? What if they are successful to some degree? And that gives rise to hilarity, confusion and a lot of fun.

But at the same time, it is murder. Somebody is lying. So there is the seriousness of it all. The tone comes from there. As a filmmaker, I like to blend tones, moods and genres and break the conventions of storytelling as much as I can. But at the same time, the tone also comes from the bizarre premise.

Truth is stranger than fiction, right?

Always! Fiction, especially today, is very normal. What is happening in the real world is crazier.

What made you want to set Killer Soup in South India? The milieu does take the drama a few notches higher...

We always wanted to set it in South India. The writers and I love the Nilgiris. A privilege of being a filmmaker is that I can walk into a culture and experience it intimately. I get a tactile sense of the culture, and the people... you spend months in prep and then months shooting. So far, I have been doing it in various places in North India. Once I got the opportunity to explore South India, I jumped right into it and also learned some Tamil in the process.

We are a country of so many languages and cultures. But because the load, especially on Hindi cinema, is so much, we have to standardise the vocabulary. I have always had a problem with it. That’s why all my films use a lot of dialects. In Killer Soup, like in Udta Punjab, people who are from there, among each other will not speak Hindi for my benefit... they will speak the language that they speak. In this, I had the opportunity to write a show in which Hindi, English, and Tamil play an equally important part. And I was never going to let it go.

The show looks and feels very different from anything in the recent past and I am not just talking about its wacky premise...

We have been used to a cookie-cutter approach. We have similar kinds of words, tonality, visuals and script... it has become very difficult to tell one from the other. Killer Soup gave a great opportunity to immediately look different.

This was an opportunity for me to go there, meet the people as they are and ask my actors to approach their work and their performances as they are and not try to appeal to a North Indian sensibility.

Were Manoj Bajpayee and Konkona Sensharma your first choice for their parts?

Even in the middle of writing, we were aware that we wanted to approach them. That is very rare with me, but this time I knew clearly that I wanted to approach them.

Even before I started writing the screenplay, I spoke to Manoj. Before I wrote my dialogue draft, I asked Konkona to be a part of it. With both Manoj and Konkona, I go back a long way. With Manoj, I have done a lot of work before this, and with Koko, I did Omkara. I produced A Death in the Gunj, her first film (as director).

I was surprised that nobody had brought Manoj and Konkona together. That was a lucky break for me. They were wonderful together.

As far as their contribution is concerned, it was immense because as writers and directors, we only can bring it to a certain level, but the actors have to own it. They do the finishing of the character, otherwise it is just on paper. Both of them are very accomplished actors. Even though this was the first time they were working together, they understood each other very quickly. It was a joy to watch them work together.

How essential was it for you to have dark, edgy humour in the mix?

This is something I enjoy doing as a filmmaker. Moods and genres are meant to be played with. But only if you can do it well. When you fail, it looks ugly on screen. I don’t think life is one-tone. I don’t believe that it is incumbent upon me as a filmmaker to be consistent with tone. But at the same time, you have to be very disciplined. You need to know the framework of the story very well.

I was not interested in realism in Killer Soup’s story. I think realism in movies is overrated. Truth is more important than reality. What you are trying to say is more important than trying to be real. I think this whole thing of internalised acting is just an excuse to do nothing on screen (laughs).

Shakespeare blends genres. If you look at some of his tragedies, there is always a clown. It is important to appeal to people and to engage them through humour, through song and dance or whatever. But be clear about what you are saying. You give them that sugar pill so that they walk into your world and then hit them with what you want to say. It makes your work easier. But doing it well is hard.

You have to be very specific about what you are doing, especially when you are on a tightrope walk between zones, between moods. Any turn of the eye, any flick of the wrist, any little gesture or tick can throw it off.

Editing Ishqiya took a very long time because it is equal parts dramatic and funny. Killer Soup was a bit like that and discipline was important while writing, shooting and editing it. Humour is something that you have to rein in. Sometimes you get carried away and you want to create an extraordinary situation because now the idea has popped into your head and you want to do it. But you have to be able to look back and say: ‘Dude, we are crossing the line here.’

Does the ending of Killer Soup leave scope for more?

I wanted to keep that lingering feeling at the end. One way to end it was that both of them are dead and it is over. But that felt reductive. I also wanted to leave it to the audience. I have given them eight hours of a story and now the last three minutes are mine and you, the viewer, make sense of it. If that helps me do a Season Two, then maybe, I don’t know. We will cross the bridge when we come to it.

How are the creative times that we are in now liberating for you as a filmmaker?

I am enjoying this. While a lot of avenues have opened up, at the same time, especially in the theatrical space, things are becoming too confined. We are missing the middle-of-the-road cinema. In theatres, we only want to watch big, angry, building-breaking stuff.

My last film (Sonchiriya) came out more than five years ago and I would want to do something for the theatres because there is this joy of watching on the big screen. I have written something, but right now, the market is not conducive to a certain kind of thought, a certain kind of filmmaking.

But I am very happy with what I am doing in streaming because it gives me much more space. If I wanted to make Killer Soup into a two-hour film for the theatres, it would have been very hard to find a release. On streaming, it is getting a nice, wide release.

Also, the real, sensitive, nuanced work is happening in streaming. This is a great way to explore myself as a filmmaker. I am fortunate. The world is going to pot, but at least we are getting the opportunity to make and talk about it in various formats!