Vikramaditya Motwane, the man behind films like Lootera and Trapped and last year’s critically acclaimed series Jubilee, goes experimental once more after AK vs AK. CTRL, a screenlife thriller about the lives of two influencers (played by Ananya Panday and Vihaan Samat) and the perils of AI, goes live on Netflix on October 4, with Vikram directing. t2 caught up with the filmmaker for a chat.
Based on trailer, premise and genre, CTRL seems very different from anything that has come out lately. Yet, being about the perils of social media, it feels relevant. What was the starting point?
I think this format (screenlife, a form of visual storytelling in which events are shown entirely on a computer, tablet or smartphone screen) is fantastic. The producers of Searching (a 2018 American film in the screenlife genre) got in touch and said they wanted to make movies in India. They asked me if I would make a film in this genre and I was like: ‘Of course! I love this format’.
I called up Avi (Avinash Sampath), the writer of AK vs AK, and I asked him for ideas. This was in the middle of the pandemic and we had all the time in the world. We started throwing these ideas around and then this one hooked us. The idea that what if we made a film about an influencer couple who suddenly break up and then all kinds of wrong stuff start happening.
At that time, AI (Artificial Intelligence) was a topic on people’s minds, but it wasn’t like what it is today. We didn’t presume that it would blow up like this, but suddenly it has become so relevant and so pressing. The joke is that we thought we were making a sci-fi film... we didn’t realise we were making a realistic film! (Laughs)
We shot CTRL in January-February 2023. It was a short shoot, about 16 days. But it has taken us 16 months of post-production work. That is because the screen had to be recreated completely from scratch. We had to make a screen, put in text, scale up or scale down high-resolution footage. You are almost doing the shot breakdown of the film after you have shot the film. That process was time consuming. Getting all the VFX stuff right has taken a long time.
If you have to define the genre CTRL belongs to, what would it be?
I think cyber thriller or tech thriller...
Does it veer towards mumblecore?
No, it is not so indie-spirited. A lot of mumblecore would be improv and unstructured. CTRL is more structured. We had a script. More than anything else, it is a screenlife thriller. It is a relatively new genre, though there have been films like Searching, Missing and Unfriended.
When we had spoken during AK vs AK, I had asked you if it was a version of your film Trapped and you had said that all your films are versions of Trapped in some way. Is CTRL a cyber version of Trapped?
Isn’t every film about being trapped in some way or the other? But I have never seen any film as being a version of another film. CTRL has an interesting story set in a pertinent time. It talks about influencer culture, about AI, about how easily we dismiss people and discard opinions. It talks about loneliness.
All of us are spending time on the Internet. This film taps into the zeitgeist to tell you a story about something that you think you don’t know about but are actually very familiar with. This film is almost like looking over somebody’s shoulder onto the laptop screen. It has a voyeuristic vibe.
What was the toughest bit about working in this genre?
A lot of the film involves conversations between a human character (played by Ananya Panday) and an AI character. We had to figure how to make that effective. I couldn’t tell the actor to imagine talking to another human... she is not, she is talking to an AI character. We had to figure out how to set that up. We had to make it feel real. A lot of technical expertise went into that. There was R&D (research and development) on how to create that AI character, how to have the motion-capture camera feed it into a conversation. We had to figure out how to shoot that kind of footage. We shot a lot of things with phones. We then had to finesse that footage, figure out how to move the camera so as it makes the viewing experience immersive.
We didn’t want to make it too simple or too difficult for the audience. What was also challenging was working on all the text that had to be filled in every single place. That turned out to be the most time-consuming part. Look at a YouTube page, for example. There is a video, for sure, but there is also a heading, a caption, comments, the like and dislike buttons and the suggestions of other videos. We had to create the followers, the comments... it was not simple. But I had an amazing team that did it very creatively. You can watch the film the first time and get invested in the story. If you watch it a second time, you will spot a lot of easter eggs.
Is this genre too experimental and can prove to be an acquired taste for most viewers?
It is a very accessible film. Most of us are consuming more content on our mobile phone screens than we are on TV or in the movie theatre. People are doing more in their online lives than their real lives! (Laughs)
The format of CTRL may be a little confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it after a couple of minutes, then it is a very immersive story. You get into it and start following the journey of the characters.
You shot CTRL in early 2023 and we know that AI is dynamic and ever-changing. Have you had to do rewrites along the way?
A little bit. One of the benefits of this format is that because there is so much that is done in post-production, you can make quite a few changes in the edit stage. In fact, the AI character that we created in early 2023 looked very dated by the time we got done with the film. So we had to redesign the character to make it look more modern.
What made you pick Ananya Panday to play the lead?
She is fantastic! She was wonderful in Gehraiyaan. There is something very fresh about her. She is also very driven and wants to play all kinds of roles. She is very expressive. There is a certain self-deprecatory tone that she brings in, which is evident in Call Me Bae as well as in CTRL. She doesn’t take herself too seriously and that is a great feature for an actor to have. She works really hard.
While researching, was there anything about this world that surprised you?
While researching on influencers, I was surprised at how much we love to peek into the lives of others. That was a fascinating insight for me. They are live-blogging their lives day in and day out. It seems very exhausting.
People log in to watch an influencer eat something or wear something or go to the airport, take a plane ride, get into a car, a trip to the temple, what their mom made for breakfast.... I thought it was a little depressing (smiles), but also fascinating. As an audience, you are probably watching a person’s vlog number 450 because those 10 minutes have become part of your viewing habit on your daily subway journey.
What is your relationship with social media?
I delete Instagram every other day and then reinstall it! I permanently got out of Twitter (now X) because I couldn’t handle it. I call it the cesspool of high horses. Everything in life should be done in moderation. Which is also, I think, the link between social media and mental health. We will be talking a lot about this in the future.
I have realised that when I am in a bit of a funk, I tend to doom-scroll a lot more. That is not good for my state of mind. I am sure it is the same for a lot of people. But to resist social media fully is tough because all these comments and likes are dopamine hits for all of us. That is why people do it.
Is there anything you watched recently that has impressed you for being out-of-the-box?
I was moved by the third season of The Bear. It hit home at some level because we are always questioning what the boundaries of creativity are and what kind of person are you allowed to be. Carmen (played by Jeremy Allen-White) is trying to figure that out for himself and this season resonated with me from an emotional perspective.
Technically, that series has been a revelation because it shows that there are no rules anymore. One episode is a long montage shot, another is a single shot and then you have episodes that are an hour long. Series format storytelling, as a whole, whether it is Shogun or House of the Dragon, is really taking risks.
With AK vs AK and now CTRL, are you also making an effort to move towards a space with less or no rules of storytelling?
The luxury of me being able to make a CTRL or an AK vs AK is because the actors and the studio in question were willing to back me. AK vs AK has been the most liberating thing I have ever done. It was so much fun... just those two actors (Anil Kapoor and Anurag Kashyap), you put the camera on, roll for eight minutes and just let them do their stuff.
I love the freedom of being able to make movies like that. But I also feel that theatrical is there for the taking and there are many interesting things that one can do in that space.
Over the last year or so, genre films have done so well theatrically. Genre films don’t need the crutches of the six-quadrant movies, ones that are obligated to cater to young and old, rich and poor, male and female. Those rules are being broken and we are finding little spaces where one can make successes happen by not wanting to tick all the boxes.