Neeraj Pandey’s mantra to stay relevant in a punishing Bollywood: ‘Chase something new, no short cuts, pull the plug when it ain’t working’

This year too, the filmmaker’s two streaming shows Secrets of the Koh-i-noor for Discovery+ and Netflix’s acclaimed Khakee: The Bihar Chapter brought him laurels. In an interview with indianexpress.com. the director says the successes is a result of his team’s commitment to work on “never seen before” content.

 

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“Courtesy the pandemic, the audience has been tutored to watch the best in what’s going around the world. They have caught up, now we need to catch up with them and overtake them in terms of presenting something they would enjoy.

“You have to respect your audience, acknowledge that they are smarter than what many people think. It is one of the commandments here at Friday Storytellers, we truly respect them and believe that we should bring them a new experience,” he said.

His latest series Khakee: The Bihar Chapter, starring Karan Tacker, Avinash Tiwary and Abhimanyu Singh among others, dropped on the streamer to positive response. He is attached to the crime thriller as a creator while it is directed by Bhav Dhulia.

Pandey says the success on streaming platforms “feels overwhelming” but he doesn’t believe in gloating in the glory. “I am amazed that one has survived so far. We never thought that this will be the journey. We just put our heads down and kept on working and taking up newer challenges.

“That has served us well. I don’t think too much in terms of what success or failure is, but just keep at it. We celebrate successes but come back to what we were doing and immerse ourselves in that. That has been rewarding.”

The filmmaker dubbed 2022 as a “good year” for the team as they managed to bring out a few of their content pieces and continued to work on a bigger slate, expected to come between 2023-2024. “The amount of development work we have done this year is exciting, fruits of which we are going to see only in 2023-2024.

“These are projects across formats and genres. We have been genre agnostic and that’s exactly what we have been doing now also. The next two years, you will see us going into multiple genres. That has been more fulfilling and challenging.”

Despite the success of Special Ops and Khakee: The Bihar Chapter, Pandey insists it isn’t that the team has cracked a streaming code, as the idea is to simply choose stories that perhaps others are not looking at.

“We choose our stories carefully; we like to stay away from stuff that is already done. Chasing something that no one has done before, which doesn’t have a short cut, excites us. Pulling the plug on something that’s not working, even if you have worked hard on it for months, is also something we do. We have the courage to do it if we see a project is not working on paper,” he added.