‘Assi has the least cheese’: Anubhav Sinha defends his ‘uncompromising’ film, says 1.2 mn viewers braved its ‘disturbing’ reality

In a spoiler-filled, post-mortem conversation about the film, Sinha speaks exclusively to SCREEN about key scenes, the balance between artistic integrity and necessary compromises, the film’s box office reception, and whether Assi stands as his most purest work to date, among several other things.

Excerpts edited for clarity and brevity 

I want to jump straight to my favorite scene, the one exploring the psyche of accused’s parents’ as a conversation between Supriya Pathak and Manoj Pahwa. Her line about building the house brick by brick and protecting her son, despite being unhappy in the marriage, was something deeply nuanced.

It’s the same logic as a good husband in Thappad. The idea was that you cannot otherize them, they’re one of us, each one of us. The moment you otherize them, as if these perpetrators are aliens who come from Mars and then go back, you shrug off your own personal responsibility. So the idea was to humanize them and see them as one of us, one of the families we know. That’s where that boy came from. Though he did not actually commit the crime, he participated. And it’s a woman who, like you said, builds it brick by brick, second by second, day after day, for years. After a point, it ceases to matter whether she is in love or not. It becomes a possession, a responsibility, a sense of belonging. That’s the sole anchor she has, the home she has built. And that won’t crumble, even if the cost is this high. That was the idea of the scene.

Like always, you’ve managed to assemble a solid ensemble led by veterans like Naseeruddin Shah, Seema Pahwa, and Supriya Pathak, and that too for what are, so to say, very minor characters who appear only for a few scenes. What’s the trick you use to get them to say yes?

Naseer bhai was cast before we started shooting, but Seema ji and Supriya ji, I think, were cast, let’s say, five days before that scene was to be shot. What happens is, I’m writing myself, and then Gaurav Solanki (screenwriter) is with me on set almost 100% of the days. We keep talking about the scenes coming up, if we want to do something with the dialogue, how the film has been shot so far, and whether we need to tweak it a bit. We were working on this scene, and initially we were going to cast just somebody else. But then we kept tweaking it, and it became far denser than we had earlier envisaged. That’s when we got into trouble and asked, “Who do we get?”

I don’t know how, but Supriya ji’s face came into my head. I’m obsessed with good actors, truly obsessed. And then I begged. Actually, in this case, I didn’t even have to beg. I just called Supriya ji and said, “Supriya ji, there is a scene.” We were in Delhi, and she was in Bombay, in the middle of her life. She said, “Yeah, when do we have to do it?” I said, “Three days later.” She said, “Give me half an hour.” I called her again after half an hour, and she said, “Done, I’ll be there.” So she came at night, shot the scene during the day, and left again that same night. They allow me the audacity to go and ask them to do a scene. And I’m really grateful to all these actors. In fact, there is a wall in my office made up of all the fantastic actors I’ve had the privilege to work with. It’s all about them. So there is no trick. I think they love me, and they are very kind people.

Anubhav Sinha with Gaurav Solanki, screenwriter of Assi.

It’s refreshing to see a deeply empathetic man like Vinay (Zeeshan Ayyub) on screen, so present and giving as a partner, and responding to the trauma with real maturity.

The chat Zeeshan and I had was that his character has already dealt with the tragedy in his head. The moment he got the phone call saying, “your wife has been found, she’s been brought to the hospital, come to this ward”, that scene isn’t in the film, but it has happened. He put the phone down, imagined the worst, and decided to take his child with him. Because if he doesn’t take the child now, she’ll come back home, and there’s no point hiding anything. He might as well take him through the journey, as much as the child can handle, even though it’s already more than he should have to.

So he has processed it. He knows she’s been assaulted. He knows she must be wounded. In fact, the brief to him was that he was relieved to see her, that it wasn’t as bad as he had imagined. The direction to Zeeshan was: what would you do if your wife met with an accident and lost her left leg? It has happened, she’s lost her leg. Now she has an artificial one and will walk with a slight unease. But she’s still the same person you love, the same person you’re married to, the same person you share a child with and will spend your life with. That’s how Vinay sees it. And that’s why he appears so unperturbed, which was always a risk, because people might feel he’s not reacting enough to such a grave situation. But we took that chance. Zeeshan understood that it had to be a very composed performance and he did that beautifully.

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Perhaps the only time we really see him up close in melancholy is on the bus, when he’s traveling with his son.

Yeah, that’s the only moment in the film where his inner grief comes into focus. I told him that this close-up, on the bus, was the only moment in the film that would be his. He’s just had this confrontation with his father on the phone, and now he’s in a corner, alone with himself. That’s when he has that moment, thinking, “What just happened?”

The film has a very a multi-faceted take on rape and also investigates the idea of vigilante justice through the character played by Kumud Mishra, something our films otherwise tend to perpetuate quite easily.

When we were writing the film, we spoke to a lot of people, casually, in offices, among students, everyone. We asked: what should be done with these rapists? And without blinking an eye, people would say they should be killed. Some responses were even more brutal, that they should be killed in public squares, and so on. That’s exactly the idea the film does not want to subscribe to. But you can’t avoid dealing with it, because that is the first reaction that comes to mind when you’re watching the film. The instinctive response is: these men are animals, kill them. But you also need to recognize that this is not a solution. That’s why that character was created.

We knew we were treading a very difficult path, that people might feel he is an outsider to the story, question who he is and what he’s doing in the film. But we felt we had to include him, to confront this immediate, instinctive response. So we wrote him very carefully, very minimally. Also, in our minds, this was not a film about Parima (Kani Kusruti); it was a film about rape. We were trying to present a 360-degree view of the issue.

The film can feel heavy-handed at times, even bordering on preachy. Were you concerned about the tonal balance you were striking?

I’ve been accused of that before, but you have to understand that I live in India, and it’s probably the most diverse country I know, also in terms of literacy levels, responses levels, and understanding. So from a very purist standpoint, you’re right, it can feel a little heavy-handed at times for some people. But for most, it doesn’t. It’s very difficult for an Indian filmmaker to make a film like this with as much artistic integrity as possible, while also trying to reach a wider and wider audience. That’s where these fault lines show up. But at this point in my career and life, I would rather talk to more people than just the converted. If I were making a film purely for the converted, it would be completely different. I wouldn’t just remove certain threads from this film to make it more palatable, I would make a fundamentally different film, which I’ll make in times to come.

You once popularly spoke about adding “cheese” to your storytelling to make it more palatable, but this feels like your most uncompromised film. Do you see it that way?

Yeah, I think so too. It has the least “cheese,” so to say. (laughs)

Anubhav Sinha says Assi is his least compromised film.

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This year saw two distinct films, Mardaani 3 and yours, Assi, both led by female protagonists battling crimes against women. Both had relatively lukewarm commercial receptions. Though they are very different films, in every sense, but do you feel the space for such stories is shrinking?

It’s unfair to look at it like that. Mardaani is a film with Rani Mukerji, who has a legacy of 25–28 years of being loved, she’s a darling of the audience. And the film itself is more palatable in nature; it has a hero. Assi doesn’t have a hero. And Taapsee doesn’t yet have that kind of legacy. But if you look at it from the brighter side, around 10 to 12 lakh people have gone to see the film in theatres. To give you perspective: a packed IPL stadium has about 40,000, 50,000 people. So we’re talking about an audience equivalent to 20 such matches going to watch the film in theatres.

But today, when we talk about box office, you have films like Dhurandhar releasing before and after, where three, four, or I don’t know, ten crore people went to watch it in theatres. So the perspective is naturally skewed, and rightfully so. But I think it’s time trade analysts, journalists, and even audiences start looking at films differently. This is a very different film from Mardaani, even in its box office intent. At the box office, I was never aiming for Rs 60, 70, 80 crores. I didn’t even expect Article 15 to do Rs 65 crores, that was a surprise. So in that sense, it’s actually quite calming to know that 12 lakh people came to theatres. If you just made 12 lakh people stand in one place, you’d feel quite happy that so many people came to watch a film that is so dark and depressing.

I want to end with two of my other favourite moments: when Vinay tells his son, playing with a toy gun, that it can lead to taking lives, and later at the end, when the same child witnesses a public shooting. It feels like a powerful bookend, almost a full circle.

The popular hero worldwide, in cinema and in life, is often the one who fires the most bullets, the one we stand up and applaud. We admire the guns, the spectacle. But to put it very simply, when conflicts like the Iran war break out, we start talking about how many missiles were used, what kind of missiles, the specifics of ammunition. People know all these details. But we have stopped talking about the dead. So I think when we choose our heroes, we should also look at what they did and how they did it. That’s why Gandhi remains a hero even after 80 years, because even when it seemed completely impractical, he kept speaking about non-violence, and he still became the hero. So I look at heroes differently. And yes, you’re right, that ending is about the cycle of violence, and hence the vigilante in the film.