Ghoul director Patrick Graham: We don’t intend to offend people

Ghoul director Patrick Graham spoke about the political subtext of this dystopian series.

After Sacred Games, Netflix is here with another original Indian series, Ghoul. Directed by Patrick Graham, the series stars Radhika Apte and Manav Kaul in lead roles. Ghoul is set in a dystopian world where citizens are under surveillance at all times. Questioning the government is not an option anymore as it may lead to individuals being labeled as ‘terrorists’. Surely, the political subtext here is strong. In a chat with indianexpress.com, Patrick Graham spoke about the concept of Ghoul.

When asked if Ghoul could offend anyone, Patrick said, “Our intention is not to really offend people. I don’t think it’s offensive to find torture, fascist governments, lack of social and political freedom to be distasteful. I think those are fair enough things to be critical about. So I don’t really see why people would take offence.” He added, “It’s certainly not aimed at anybody in particular, it’s not aimed at any government. It’s anti-certain ways of thinking.”

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Patrick also said that it’s up to people to interpret Ghoul the way they want. “I think what we’d like is for audiences to take away what they read into it and how they interpret things. I think the main priority for us was to tell a really nice story. And the backdrop of that kind of political dystopia just adds to the atmosphere a lot,” he said.

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Ghoul is a three episode series on Netflix. We asked Patrick why they made it as a series and not as a film. “It started off as a film when we first started developing it, but then at an early stage, Netflix came on board. They enjoyed the material and they thought, why not make it into a mini-series. The great thing about adding on a bit of extra time to tell the stories, we could flesh things out a little bit. So really great opportunity for us to expand upon the story that we already had,” Patrick said.