It’s strange, and at the same time quite telling, that both Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, released on the same day, could easily exchange their titles, and it would only make each of them more thoughtful. After all, what is Homebound if not a battle fought every single day by its characters, each trying to find their place in a nation that seems to have no space for them anymore. Based on the moving New York Times article "A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway" by Basharat Peer (who also co-wrote one of the defining films of the last decade, Haider), the film is a rare feat. It not only expands on the already heart-breaking source material but also manages to capture the spirit of India in times as divided as these. In many ways, it feels like a coming-of-age moment for Ghaywan as a filmmaker. But he isn’t the only one who has shaped this film’s narrative. Ghaywan put together what could be called a “writers’ room” of sorts — with three talented collaborators: Sumit Roy (known for Gehraiyaan and Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani), Varun Grover (who co-wrote Ghaywan’s debut feature Masaan), and actor Shreedhar Dubey, (who played an instrumental role in grounding the dialogues in lived authenticity). In an exclusive conversation with SCREEN, Roy and Dubey spoke about the process of adapting the film from Peer’s article, the narrative choices they made along the way, the surreal experience of receiving feedback from none other than Martin Scorsese, and their response to some of the criticism the film has faced. Excepts edited for clarity and brevity How did you become involved as the screenwriters for the film, and were you familiar with Basharat Peer’s article before joining the project? Roy: Somen Mishra at Dharma had read Basharat's article and brought it to Neeraj, believing it might make a strong film. Neeraj took to it and started doing his research to find a way to transform that article into a workable screenplay. However, he was struggling to crack it open and having a little bit of a crisis of confidence since he's primarily a director and had never written a feature screenplay before. Neeraj and Somen reached out to see if I'd be interested in co-writing. I hadn't read Basharat's article before coming on board but had seen that famous picture of Mohammad cradling Amrit which had been going around during the pandemic. As soon as I read the article I knew two things — this is going to be a very hard film to make and release and that it's going to be a very important film to make and release. Something that is quite difficult but worthwhile is creatively irresistible to me! So I knew I had to do the film. Dubey: So Neeraj and I go a long way back to Wasseypur days where he was an assistant. Then our bond only deepened when we started working on Masaan as it was a very tough film to put on the map and I have seen Neeraj’s struggle very closely. Since then onwards, I collaborated with him on Juice, the short film he made, and later on Geeli Pucchi, which was an amazing creative process. It was only then that the germ of Homebound was born, as we were just coming out of the pandemic and had seen a lot of news stories about the migrant worker crisis, and we strongly felt that this is something that needs to be told. The screenplay expands far beyond the source material, especially in the first half, which imagines the backstory of Amrit and Saiyub. What inspired this choice, considering the original piece was already deeply moving and many filmmakers might have adhered closely to it? Roy: I was very clear that the primary creative ambition for me wasn't to design a film for a festival jury, but to find a way to tell this story which would allow a wide Indian audience to relate to the two boys — to make it accessible to viewers who might otherwise think a film like this is not their cup of tea. I thought the best route for that was to tell it as a 'dosti story' — which is a deeply relatable relationship dynamic across geography and class for desi audiences. For that kind of a story to work you need to spend time with the boys understanding their world and who they are. So we made the call to make Basharat's piece the finale of the film. The first act of the film is about anticipation in a sense. The boys are in limbo waiting for the results of the police exam. That act becomes like a chronicle of their quotidian — which allows us to absorb the everyday texture of their lives, see their struggle, understand what's at stake for them — so that by the time the narrative shifts to the pandemic, you're hopefully deeply invested in what happens to them. Dubey: Yeah, we were very clear that we needed to go well beyond the source material, as many other things had happened in the recent past and this was our only chance to tell them. Moreover, a lot of documentaries had already been made on the migrant crisis, so while we realised we needed to tell that story, our aim was never to simply to adhere to it word by word. This, of course, made the film difficult to make for obvious reasons — and also because audiences traditionally are not very keen on watching highly grief-laden stories. But my viewpoint was always that this isn’t a story of melancholy, it’s about the spirit of living despite all odds. It's about friendship, and this is where Neeraj told me that he wanted me to sculpt dialogues that feel organic, like the way two close friends talk, revealing where they come from and what their lives are like. One of my favourite scenes is when Chandan’s sister calls out his male privilege — a powerful intersection of caste, class, and gender. What was your thought process behind writing that scene? Roy: We were looking for a moment that would serve as a pivot for Chandan's character to 'grow up' and take life by the scruff of the neck. Neeraj had this idea to have Chandan confront the 'male privilege' that he took for granted, that had allowed him to float around in life, while his sister was doing hard, deflating work to provide for the family. It felt like a dramatic choice that went against the grain, because here was a character already miserable, with good reason to feel bad for himself, being confronted with a reality that would only make him feel worse — but to Neeraj's credit he landed the moment beautifully. That realisation hits hard for Chandan, gives him perspective and ends up deepening his resolve to do right by his family. We tend to see the marginalised as a homogenous category but even amongst the powerless, there are hierarchies. There are the oppressed and the much more oppressed — and the latter are usually women. When you have very little — who gets to eat the bigger morsel, go to school/college, have access to opportunities? And who gets left out? If you've grown up in India, the depressing answers to these questions are part of your lived reality and hit home hard, like they do in that scene. With so much hardship on screen, how did you ensure the film didn’t slip into poverty porn or excessive pity, and instead remained an authentic portrayal of reality? Roy: What really helped was the extensive fieldwork Neeraj and our researcher Shoaib Nazeer undertook. They travelled widely, observed, listened, and that authenticity found its way into the writing. I’m extremely research-oriented when it comes to films based on real-life stories, and Neeraj shares that rigor. When you're daring to tell the story of the lived experiences of real people, you have to approach this with a certain care and artistic humility. My process is to keep researching till I feel I've earned the right to tell the story. Homebound has very dramatic things happening in the plot — romance, fights, breakups, profound grief — but because we were writing from a place of observation, we felt confident about the choices we were making. They felt organic and true to us. The film carries a distinctly melodramatic tone reminiscent of classics like Do Bigha Zamin and Jagte Raho. Was that intentional from the start? What cinematic or literary references shaped the writing? Roy: Basharat’s deeply moving piece was, of course, the starting point for the film and his article grounded our writing in a kind of neo-realistic tone. Neeraj has always told me he's deeply influenced by the cinema of Ken Loach and the Dardenne Brothers — who have an observational aesthetic, verité if you like. But I think Neeraj's biggest strength is that he's very comfortable handling big emotions and landing them in a way where they feel raw, authentic and get under your skin. Melodrama is sometimes used as a pejorative term but it doesn't have to be. I don't really think Homebound has a melodramatic tone, it has a humanistic tone that harks back to classics deeply connected to the lives of the underprivileged and those close to the soil. I think what matters most is whether you land the emotions in a way that feels real or not. The rest is all theory. That’s really what you’re chasing as storytellers — the emotional truth of a moment, because if it feels false, audiences will snap out of your story and disengage. What was it like working with Martin Scorsese, and what kind of feedback did he share during the process? Roy: Marty was surprisingly involved and very detail-oriented. He sent Neeraj extensive notes on the script and the edit. One of the key things that happened as a consequence of his intervention was that a track which focused on Ishaan's character's romance got cut from the film — to keep the story more focused on the dosti of the boys. It was quite a beautiful storyline, but on reflection Marty might've been right — perhaps it wasn't needed in the film. Also Read | Neeraj Ghaywan’s sophomore feature Homebound uses belonging as a smokescreen to reveal how this is no country for the marginalized Some critics feel moments like the Indo-Pak match scene come across as heavy-handed in their political messaging. How do you respond to that? Roy: We were coming from a place of observed reality in that scene, and I’m quite comfortable with how we chose to play that moment. Some others have said that the film should have underlined its political messaging even more! I don't think there's any point trying to make a film to cater to other people's aesthetic convictions — we're just making the one that comes naturally to us. Dubey: Totally, because when you watch something on screen, it feels like there’s spoon feeding happening. But when you see it in real life, this is what’s been happening all along! I can give so many instances where something similar has happened and we’ve all either observed or participated in such conversations. So, in terms of dialogues, whatever has been written is something we’ve only been hearing all around us. Speaking of the dialogues, some critics argue that the film’s poetic dialogues feel inauthentic to the characters’ social backgrounds. How do you respond to that? Dubey: Sorry if this comes across as insensitive, but whoever is saying such things really needs to travel across our country — its length and breadth — to realise how many of us, in so many circumstances, speak in ways that might sound poetic or rhythmically philosophical. If you read both Hindi and Urdu, you realise how much poetry from those languages has seeped into our everyday lives. It’s very much in our veins, and so it is for the characters. For instance, Shoaib’s character has even gone to school and had a basic education, would he never have read a poet or recited a poem at a school assembly? Above all, don’t these people have the right to be poetic just because they’re poor? That’s such a reductionist understanding of the world. By that logic, Kabir Das wouldn’t have existed! What about the lullabies mothers sing to their children? Shouldn’t they exist either? Roy: I’d just like to add that people making such criticism might be looking at the lives of the deprived in a blinkered way or have gotten used to stereotypical depictions of the poor. What makes them think the marginalised don’t have a rich inner life or the urge to express themselves? Poetry — or poeticism, a certain way with words — isn’t just the preserve of the privileged. It needs sensitivity and flair that come from within. How much you have in your pocket doesn’t define that. Conversely, I can think of many privileged people I know who don’t have an iota of poetry in them!
