In 2016, the John le Carré 1993 bestseller The Night Manager was adapted into the British web series of the same name, starring Tom Hiddleston in the title role and with Hugh Laurie pitted against him. Also starring Olivia Colman and Elizabeth Debicki, The Night Manager met with a lot of praise.

Now, the show makes its way to India with Aditya Roy Kapur slipping into the character of the ‘night manager’ and facing off against a ruthless arms dealer, played by Anil Kapoor. The show, streaming on Disney+Hotstar from February 17, has Sobhita Dhulipala, Tillotama Shome and Saswata Chatterjee playing key roles. TT caught up with the show’s creator-director Sandeep Modi, co-director Priyanka Ghosh and producer Deepak Dhar, CEO and founder Banijay Asia.

In terms of scale and storytelling, The Night Manager is a big, big show to adapt. Having lived with the show for two years, what are the emotions like as we approach D-Day?

Sandeep Modi (creator and director): : While I have been very tempted to read up what’s on social and the comments on YouTube, I have refrained from doing so. Also, we haven’t really had the time to process any emotions, given that even till last night we were still working on the show.

Priyanka Ghosh (co-director): We all are still living in this (The) Night Manager bubble and only meet each other 24 hours of the day! So we are either praising each other or beating each other up! (Laughs) Even before the show has come out, all of it feels very overwhelming... to hear good things about the trailer and one hopes that opinion remains the same once the show comes out.

Deepak Dhar (producer): After the trailer dropped, I have had the opportunity to interact with a lot of people and most of them are finding this adaptation of The Night Manager a cut above all the series that have been produced recently. It’s very cinematic, it’s rooted in the kind of space it exists in.

John le Carré’s book came out 30 years ago. The TV series with Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston was made in 2016. What made you decide to adapt The Night Manager into Hindi now?

Deepak: From a creative and commercial point of view, we are constantly looking at stories that can be brought into the country; stories that can be easily adapted and give our viewers a show with an A-list star cast and huge mounting. The Night Manager just fit like a glove. There has been no other show in the recent past which has been such a stellar success across the globe. It was waiting to be adapted and when Disney+Hotstar and the rest of us got into a room, we decided that this was a story that needed to be told.

What’s the key to taking a story like The Night Manager and contextualising it without sacrificing its global theme and vibe?

Sandeep: Unlike in Aarya, this time around I had more material to adapt from. We didn’t only have the original show but also the book. I think cultural adaptation is the key. The largest challenge that we faced was to understand how rich people in the West are different from the rich guys in Asia (smiles). With Aarya, it was relatively simpler for us to take a Dutch story (Penoza) from the Netherlands and set it in Jaipur as Aarya… the vibe automatically changed. But with The Night Manager, we had to really figure out how to change the world of choppers and guns and rich people blowing away their money and basically being all bad... how is that different in any other place in the world?! How do we culturally set this up was the biggest question we asked ourselves.

For me, The Night Manager is the story of two worlds — of the haves and the have-nots. It’s a story of a guy who has a regular job. I find the night manager (played by Aditya Roy Kapur) just like any other guy in hospitality working a night shift. We had to come up with a credible journey of how an average Joe like him turns into a spy. So we had to work quite a bit towards finding and then establishing that. Once you find the cultural context, the story will automatically unfold itself and tell itself. Then all you have to do is to type it out.

We had been circling this beast called The Night Manager for a long time and trying to find these answers. At that time, it was four months of just scratching our heads and that felt like the darkest road ever. We were stuck in a room for weeks and months just rewriting. But the whole team knew what we were after and what they had signed up for. But thankfully, we found our way out and in a few months, we had our script (smiles).

I believe that the pursuit of excellence has no completion, it only has abandon. And so last night, Priyanka and I abandoned it finally for you guys to watch (smiles).

You have to let your baby go out into the world. It must be a liberating feeling...

Sandeep: It’s a complicated feeling. We have been on this journey for some years now and though one feels happy it’s over, somewhere there is also the feeling of emptiness.

Does it put pressure on you that you are putting out a spy thriller in a world where the audience, now more than ever, knows its Faudas and Homelands so well?

Sandeep: It’s not pressure... I call it awareness. Technology has changed since the original Night Manager came out and why should the viewer see it with the same lens. A lot of scenes and plot devices had to be changed. The basics of the writing room are that we have to always think that the viewer’s IQ and awareness are more than that of ours. They have seen more than you, they have read more than you. The audience of this show doesn’t need anything to be dumbed down. They can hear between the lines and smell the silences.

When you watched the original show, what struck you the most?

Sandeep: I want to tell you a controversial thing. When I was first approached to make The Night Manager in Hindi, I said, ‘I can make it, but I am not a fan (of the original)’. I thought that would be the last day of my job interview (laughs), but kudos to the producers and the (streaming) platform who wanted to know why I still wanted to make it when I hadn’t liked the original. They were more interested in knowing how I wanted to do it differently. Once I laid out my vision and my point of view then there has been unwavering support.

What I did like about the original show was the tone. On OTT, we tend to make content which is sometimes tonally too hard... all guns and gore and grime and cuss words.... I have always felt that if you have a medium that reaches so many people, your content cannot be so narrow. The Night Manager has a story which is so cinematic and covers half a decade in the lives of its characters. Why this guy becomes a spy is what hooked me and that’s how I wanted to approach it. For me, Batman is a great story, but I am more interested in how ‘Batman begins’!

Deepak, what made you give the job to Sandeep despite him hurting his prospects right at the beginning?

Deepak : The fact that he wasn’t smitten by the original story. The fact that he could better it. I thought that he came in with the spark of how to make it bigger, better and more rooted in the Indian context.

Priyanka, did you have similar thoughts about the original?

Priyanka: : For me, what worked about the original Night Manager was how it didn’t narrow things down to one khancha (cage). I get disheartened when anyone calls our show an espionage thriller. It is much more than that. This is a show which sheds light on the finer things... like showing the family life and personal connections of an arms dealer (Shailendra Rungta, played by Anil Kapoor). How is a RAW agent’s (Tillotama Shome) life back at home? Why is a mysterious, beautiful woman (Sobhita Dhulipala’s Kaveri) stuck with a ruthless arms dealer? There is so much human drama, deceit, lies, secrets... it’s not just a thriller. It’s a huge canvas. Also, in our current socio-political scenario, a story about warmongers is so relevant.

I loved how you nonchalantly slipped in the word ‘khancha’...

Priyanka: Oh, I thought it’s also a Hindi word! (Laughs)

Sandeep: I am glad you mentioned that because it reminded me how I was very sure that my hero in The Night Manager has to be Bengali! And so Aditya is named Shaan Sengupta. I think we have really typecast our characters... like someone who plays a spy has to be....

Kapoor or Oberoi? Sandeep: True! Tillotama’s character is called Lipika Saikia Rao. And my villain (Rungta) is Marwari. I love putting in these fun touches.