Raat Akeli Hai writer Smita Singh says comparisons with Knives Out ‘upset’ her because she wrote her film first: ‘It was bought in 2015’

The first Raat Akeli Hai was more about gender and sexual harassment at home, whereas the second instalment goes macro and talks about class differences. What was your idea behind The Bansal Murders?

For me, Raat Akeli Hai 1 was about looking at family structures within feudal, patriarchal setups because I’ve seen them up close. Also, I care deeply about the world I come from and live in. I remember this conversation I had with my father during the 2024 Lok Sabha Elections. His prediction made me realize he only watches legacy media. And I kept telling him there’s this other narrative also, and you’re noticing it. There’s a way to get the truth. I has been democratized. People seek out the truth, no matter whether you suppress it or buy it institutionally. They’ll find their own ways. You can throw bombs on another country, but people will see it for what it is. Narrative doesn’t work after that. I was struggling to find an idea for Raat Akeli Hai 2 ever since I finished Khauf in 2022. Then I thought it has to be about the death of legacy media. It was out of that anger about the narrative constantly being built and not necessarily listening to the voices on ground.

How did you fit that into Raat Akeli Hai’s whodunit template?

A lot of people ask me that even about Khauf, how I blend horror with what women go through everyday. But I think it’s not just me. A lot of the narrative today has changed into people not wanting to escape too much. They want to live in that reality. Even if it’s a sci-fi story, they want to see what it’s taken away from the world. I’m trying to disengage with the injustices of the world and just focus on telling stories, but I haven’t been very successful at that. Jatil Yadav going out to find out the truth about these people is about digging into the guilt of society. I knew it has to be about the death of legacy media and this family that gets massacred, but the rest of it was a gradual discovery that got me really excited. But ya, I told myself I’m never going to do a whodunit again. It’s very, very difficult.

Monika Panwar in Khauf.

The Raat Akeli Hai franchise is as much a why-dunnit as a whodunit because the killer is as much a victim. How did you devise this template?

Actually, I hadn’t thought about it till I began thinking of part 3. It’s then that I analyzed that I’ve done this both times. Now that I have a template, it’s become a problem. What do I do now? But whenever a crime happens, there’s more to it. Even in Khauf, the character of Jeeva, who’s also the entity, I didn’t need to connect him to the mother (Geetanjali Kulkarni) and show his scenes with her at all. But for me, it was important to look at the whole society holistically. I’ve been getting reactions like, “Oh, it’s so predictable the servant did it!” But do you think about why? Why does crime happen in a certain way? That’s exactly where I want you to look. If this is the only reading that can come from a whodunit, then we’ve already failed. There’s a reason why Agatha Christie books couldn’t be adapted into cinema before Knives Out. It has to be about more things. The genre alone doesn’t work.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon recently revealed that Netflix asked them to place the action sequence first in their new movie, The Rip. Did you get any such feedback from the streamer while doing Raat Akeli Hai?

No, I didn’t even get one line of feedback from them during the scripting of the show. I’m not sure about the editing stage if they asked something to come first or not. There may have been a couple of changes. But that’s between the director and them. To me, personally, I wasn’t even asked to cut anything even once. In fact, the only feedback I got was to deepen the themes. In this, the murder actually happens on the 30th page. I told them it’s not something I can start with a bang. And we know how critical it is for an OTT film to start with a bang because then the viewer would switch to something else. The only worry I had was if Raat Akeli Hai is still something the audience is going to come back to because when the first film released, there was very little OTT content.

Smita Singh is the screenwriter of Raat Akeli Hai and Khauf.

Can you share a scene that didn’t make it to the final cut that you’re really fond of?

There was a scene between Radha (Radhika Apte) and Jatil which connected to how we left them in the previous film and what the conflict between them is now. It was a three-shot sequence that Honey had done beautifully. It was an introduction into their love story. The proposal is left in the air. She goes to college and when he sees her talking to a young man, he feels whether he can’t compete with a modern man of today. She doesn’t even introduce him, making him wonder where he fits into her world. You can sense the hesitation in him. She also asks him why he comes to her college in the police uniform. Which is why he tells her later that all he’s earned is bhay (fear), from his uniform. He hides behind his uniform. I’ve read some reactions that say the film starts slow. So, do the streamers know their audience better than we do? And the bigger question is, how far do you go to cater to that audience? The audience has already watched the trailer, read the synopsis, and seen forensics and blood in the opening credits, and they still won’t wait for what’s coming? But it’s also something you can’t take a chance with. These are laments you always have. I’ve killed my darlings so often. It’s something you live with, but there’s always a fear. Maybe their data tells them something we probably don’t know.

Were you bothered by everyone calling Raat Akeli Hai India’s Knives Out?

I was so upset I can’t tell you because I wrote it back in 2013. It was bought in 2015! Before that, it went to Sundance Film Festival, where directors from all over the world come. Now, in my script, there’s also a family, a male cop, a patriarch who is murdered, and a poor girl who’s the primary suspect. In Knives Out, the patriarch is also poisoned. That was also the case with the patriarch in my film. We took that track out! Now, imagine what if we had kept the track? We even shot it and then put it out. I just know that I wrote it first and registered it in 2013.

Kubbra Sait and Nawazuddin Siddiqui in Sacred Games.

Your association with Nawazuddin Siddiqui goes back to Sacred Games in 2017. How have you seen his evolution since then?

The way he was in Sacred Games, it absolutely blew my mind. He had done a lot of gangster stuff, but for Sacred Games, I really wanted him. Once Vikram (Vikramaditya Motwane) told us that Nawaz is locked, I got so excited because then you know how the character is going to sound and how much to hold back. When I saw the pilot, I couldn’t believe how dheet (stubborn) his Ganesh Gaitonde was (laughs). The way Anurag Kashyap framed him, there was something very attractive about him. There’s something he brings out in Nawaz, which is very masculine, sinewy, and a strange, dark attraction. In Raat Akeli Hai, he had to play someone morally upright, which is very different. And the thing with those characters is they’re very boring. The only thing that could change it a little bit was the relationship with his father. In the first one, he was constantly jostling with something inside. He had a deep desire for this woman, but also had a moral hypocrisy of judging women. We didn’t put him through the wringer in part 2. I was worried if the audience would see the protagonist enough because I haven’t given him anything, but the constant need to dig for the truth. There’s his scene with Guru Maa (Deepti Naval) where she tells him when somebody comes looking for truth outside, there’s a truth within they’re running away from. This was still more of a clinical whodunit than him dealing with his sense of desire and who he is. And he did it fabulously this time as well. If we get to make a third film, we’d really get into what he’s truly seeking. This film was more of a bridge between the first one and what’s to come next.

Since you’ve been associated with streaming since its inception in India, where do you think it’s facing challenges now?

The problem with streaming started once the numbers started coming in. When they didn’t, we were allowed to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. But now, there’s very clear data on what works and what doesn’t. My reading is that it’s never that simple. You do three horror shows that don’t work, you’d decommission Khauf, right? But then you have no idea what a different show like Khauf can do. It’s these things that slip in through the cracks. The problem is people have started to read too much into that data. We have to go beyond numbers because people respond to what they get.

Did you miss being in the writers room of Sacred Games season 2?

Sitting in the writers room was frustrating for me. Writers are taught to follow our own instincts. When the three or four of us are sitting in one room and trying to lead by our own convictions, it would certainly lead to clashes with each other’s convictions. For me, writing is led by my own journey into the world. That didn’t work for me in the writers room of season 1.

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Did too many cooks spoil the broth in Sacred Games season 2 then?

It would me very wrong of me to say that. It was a 900 page book, right? We’d just done 100 pages in season 1. How would you commission season 3 if you kill Gaitonde in season 2? If you close the loop, then how will you? You killed him in season 1 itself, but you also closed the loop of how he got killed in season 2.