Vikramaditya Motwane’s CTRL is a screenlife film – meaning that nearly everything that takes place in the narrative is unfolding on the screen of a cellphone or a laptop. The Hindi movie’s executive producers include the Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov, who has previously bankrolled the screenlife movies Searching (2018), Unfriended: Dark Web (2018) and Missing (2023). It was Bekmambetov who approached Motwane to make a screenfilm movie, Motwane told Scroll.
Motwane’s sixth feature explores the sinister side of technology through a heartbroken Gen Z influencer. Nella signs up for an artificial intelligence programme called CTRL to cope with a failed relationship, not realising that the app is taking charge of her life.
CTRL will be out on Netflix on October 4. The movie is based on a story by Avinash Sampath and has been written by Sampath and Motwane. CTRL stars Ananya Panday, Vihaan Samat and Aparshakti Khurana as the voice of the AI character Allen.
In an interview, 47-year-old Motwane spoke to Scroll about the efforts that went into creating Nella’s world and CTRL’s take on the social impact of AI. Here are edited excerpts.
How did you get associated with CTRL?
Timur Bekmambetov was the person who called me up and asked me whether I wanted to do a screenlife film. That film didn’t eventually didn’t work out, it had a different structure. But Timur is still one of the executive producers on CTRL.
I had loved Searching and Unfriended. This is such an underrated format of storytelling, especially since we are all familiar with social media. All of us are doing video calls and Google searches and watching YouTube videos.
Tell us about constructing the screenlife world of CTRL.
We first did a two-day mock shoot with stand-in actors. This was to understand whether the story was working, and what we were likely to face when we actually went into production.
This exercise gave us a lot of clarity and ironed out a lot of potential problems. But we were still very dependent on the internet. No matter how good we were with the set-up, our failures were because we would lose the internet connection.
The shoot was 16 days , while the post-production took 16 months. We had to make every single thing from scratch. If we needed a YouTube video for the film, we had to create what was in it, the interface, every single comment, every single like. My team of assistant directors are the heroes. They have done the film authentically. They have put their minds to every single detail.
It was a very interesting process – a kind of backward filmmaking. It was time-consuming, but liberating too. Somebody was doing the sound, somebody was creating AI characters, somebody was trying to make good connections. It was good fun – I loved it.
So how did you actually shoot CTRL?
Nella’s laptop is the master of the film – that is almost like saying that we are shooting one single long shot, and that is the master. We use Zoom as the interface of the app control.
There’s Nella who is talking into her home window. Allen is in another room with a motion capture camera on his face. That camera is linked to Unreal Engine [a 3D game software], where we have created Allen’s face through MetaHuman. That in turn feeds like a normal Zoom call into Nella’s laptop. Throughout the process, she is actually speaking through an AI tool.
We also have control of her laptop to be able to throw in pictures or videos to get her reactions. At the same time, we are recording her footage and every other call coming in at 4K. We are screen-capturing her laptop screen when she is talking to Allan.
Screenlife imagery can be drab. How did you work on making CTRL visually interesting?
That’s where showing a couple is interesting, because it gives you a chance to be visually appealing. As long as we can immerse people into this world within the first five minutes, which happens through their love story, then we are off and running.
The real aesthetic we had to focus on was the CTRL app. Since this was a mass market product, a lot of concentration was on making it soothing. A lot of actual apps create a cocoon almost of what your vibe is.
The actors also had cameras on them. Nella’s laptop had a mount through which a camera was looking at her all time. We always had two phones stuck back to back so that the actors could look at themselves but also at the recordings on the phones. All of this was in natural light to make it as organic as possible.
Every FaceTime call was live. The actors didn’t mock anything up. We wanted to make it as realistic and vibrant as possible. It was a geek-fest.
Ananya Panday is the film’s surprise element.
She is very representative of her generation. Also, I really liked her in Gehraiyaan. She got something much deeper than what you normally see. That wasn’t a surface-level performance – her eyes weren’t lying.
From among the new girls, she felt correct. She already has a social media presence. Also, I wanted to cast someone who get trolled, which happens to Ananya in real life. Nella and Ananya feel like they could inhabit the same sort of world and have the same reactions to the same things.
There is a lack of inhibition in her that is beautiful. She’s not worried about where the camera is looking. There’s no vanity.
You directed Aparshakti Khurana in the streaming series Jubilee. Why did you cast him as Allen?
We had somebody else before Apar. But I realised that I wanted a comic flirt who was almost cute, endearing and trying too hard to be friendly. But when it was time to get creepy, he had to be able to go there. He had to have that mass market personality, local and colloquial and rasta boy, sort of.
Apar brought so much to the table. He was on the sets or in the next room from Ananya, since this was all being done live. It gave us a lot of space to be spontaneous.
What is CTRL telling us about at least a couple of generations who live their lives inside their screens?
I loved Avinash Sampat’s story. We were writing the film during the coronavirus pandemic, so it already felt futuristic. We didn’t realise that by the time the film’s release, we would be so close to the reality right now.
Our first attempt was to do a classic genre piece about revenge. But given the conversations about AI, we realised that there was a lot more that we could say about social media, data and privacy in the guide of a straightforward thriller. What really struck me was loneliness – can we really live without social media?
What is the movie’s stand on machine learning taking over human intelligence?
You can’t really blame the technology. It’s the people running the technology whom we need to question. This has been true of any technology in the past century.
Instagram or Facebook are not bad in themselves. But who are the masters running them? Who is determining how the technology will be used? Who is gatekeeping any of the stuff in the world right now with everybody caught up with stock market prices and profits? They are the ones we are trying to question here.
You haven’t had a theatrical release since Bhavesh Joshi Superhero in 2018, focusing instead on shows and films for streaming. Are you more comfortable with streaming at the moment?
I do want to go back to theatrical. It’s a very interesting time for theatrical. You can make films in a pure genre space, especially at a large scale.
I can make a small film like AK vs AK in streaming because that allows me a certain amount of experimentation. Theatrical won’t allow that, but it will allow you to do a pure action or a horror film.
