Ali Abbas Zafar reveals his ‘go-to writer’ is William Shakespeare, says Bard packed ‘a lot of drama’ in his plays

He said, “It’s difficult to use material that has already been made to do homework, because then you get heavily inspired. What is very important for us is, you need to pick up more of writers’ work. I’m very strongly inspired by a lot of Indian writers, and a lot of international writers. My go-to writer for all the drama and how to bring the drama into the film is Shakespeare.”

Describing what makes Shakespeare so great, he added, “If you pick up any text of Shakespeare, whether it’s Macbeth, whether it’s Othello, or Midsummer Night’s Dream or Merchant of Venice, you will always find a lot of drama within those texts, which is very adaptable to any age, any era.”

Ali’s last film was Bloody Daddy, in which Shahid Kapoor chases a bag of drugs and allows his son to get kidnapped (twice) by a gang of criminals led by Sanjay Kapoor. His political thriller series Tandav, on the other hand, has a 0% score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.