Neeraj Pandey departs from his usual thriller template to tell a musical love story with Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha, but with a twist. The film stars Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Jimmy Shergill, Shantanu Maheshwari and Saiee Manjrekar. We got chatting with the Howrah boy about his latest — and beyond — that releases in cinemas today.

No matter what the circumstances are, you always come across as unflappable. Does that also apply to the Friday of a film or OTT release?

Nothing changes for me. That is because one needs to understand that after the execution of a project, a filmmaker knows it is out of his hands. Your time to give it your best is while you are executing it, not when you are promoting it or waiting for it to release. The only time I can control it is when I am making a film, whether writing or directing it. I put in my best and then hope for the best.

So there is no adrenaline rush or a burst of nervous energy on release day?

There is. I am human. If I have to sum it up in a word, I will say that I am always 'curious'. I want to know how the audience analyses what I have made. As a maker, that is the time when you get to understand how much you are connected to your audience. It is a time of learning from their point of view and seeing whether the story that you have made resonates with the viewer or not in the manner that you expected it to.

Is that sense of curiosity or intrigue a little bit more with Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha in which you explore fresh terrain as a filmmaker?

You are right. It is a bit of a departure for me. Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha is a full-blown musical. For me, a musical doesn't mean inserting songs into a narrative. It includes the background, the texture of the film... this is a true-blue musical, something which our audience hasn't seen in Hindi cinema in a while. It also goes against the grain of whatever has been coming out in theatres in the last few months.

You have wanted to make a film in this genre for many decades. What finally brought it to fruition?

The story of this film came to me two years ago. It was in the form of something I remembered happening in my para (locality) while growing up in Howrah.

That germ of an idea eventually developed into a full-blown story. As a kid, you are made to believe certain myths and mysteries attached to a few characters in your locality. Some part of that stays on in your life and that is what happened in this regard.

The film has ultimately become bigger than what we expected it to be. It traverses 23 years and is almost a lifetime. I am very glad that we managed to put together this exciting cast and crew.

I am sure if you have to revisit your childhood and scour for stories in Howrah, you will have material for a lot more films!

That is right! (Laughs) We had some very colourful characters in our locality. One's personality shapes up in the environment one grows up in and Howrah did that for me. It will always be extra special to me.

What made you pick Ajay Devgn and Tabu for the main leads, actors you haven't worked with before?

This is a musical love story with an edge of intrigue and I needed actors who could do justice to all its layers. Ajay was the first person to be cast and we took some time to zero in on Tabu. We started looking for actors who could play what is perhaps one of the most difficult parts in the film, and then we decided on Jimmy (Shergill). Eventually, we started looking out for the younger version of Ajay and Tabu's characters and got Shantanu (Maheshwari) and Saiee (Manjrekar). That happened through auditions and wasn't too difficult a process.

This is Ajay and Tabu's 11th film together. The familiarity and comfortable chemistry must have helped but did it take away from the freshness of the romance in the story?

Ajay and Tabu haven't done a pure romantic film in a long time and that definitely helped Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha. They have been in quite a few films together of late, but they have been mostly pitted against each other. The nature of our film is very different and I don't recall them doing anything like this in the recent past. As such, my only concern was that they had been doing a lot of work together. That bothered me a bit. But it finally worked out well.

A few years ago, you and Ajay had famously signed up to work together on the ambitious project 'Chanakya'. What happened to that?

It is on the back burner for now. Hopefully, we will be able to revive it. How and when I don't know but it is definitely something that I am not done with. It is still on my to-do list.

Did you discover a new facet of yourself as a filmmaker while making Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha?

Every challenge is an excitement in our business, you are looking at problem-solving more than anything else. One of the big challenges for me was that this film is a musical and the songs had to be recorded as part of the narrative. So they obviously had to get recorded way before the filming began. M.M. Kreem sir (who won an Oscar for RRR) is the one I went back to as the music director, while Manoj (Muntashir) has written the lyrics.

The biggest challenge was that because the songs are a part of the narrative, they had to flow very organically in terms of the lyrics, in terms of the music and texture. It was a very exciting journey of making the music of the film and then figuring out the visuals that will come into the songs and then making it an integral part of the lyrics.

Somebody pointed out to me a few days ago that a Bollywood film hasn't had an OST (Original Soundtrack) in a very long time. Mostly, our films these days have a set of scattered songs, of which one is invariably a remix. Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha is a healthy departure from that.

The audience of today is complex, they are not looking for just one thing in a film. They want to see something good, something new, something exciting... they are not going to be satisfied with something which is average and as filmmakers, we have to respect that and step up.

This is indicative of good times in the future and even if it hurts us today, I think makers will have to get into some sort of a reframe and do something exciting in order to entice the audience.

Also, most people are willing to wait a month or two and watch a film when it comes on streaming instead of making an expensive trip to the movie theatre...

That onus is on the maker in terms of the content that he or she puts out. They should challenge the audience that you shouldn't be waiting one-and-a-half months for this... you need to come and watch it in the theatres now or you will miss out.

Special Ops to Khakee, how liberating has it been to tell your stories in a longer format than cinema?

It keeps me fresh because I keep learning new things on the storytelling front. Otherwise, whatever the format, the rules remain the same. You still have to get out the best performances, you still have to pay attention to the writing, you still have to take good care of your project in post (production). Doing a series keeps me on my toes all the time as opposed to the long gap that happens between making films.