Karan Tejpal’s Stolen was premiered to a rapturous response at the Mumbai Film Festival in 2023. Tejpal’s feature debut, about the nightmarish experiences of two affluent brothers who are mistaken for kidnappers in a rural corner of India, was expected to get a theatrical release. Instead, Stolen has been picked up by Prime Video, where it will be streamed from June 4.
The Hindi movie’s emergence has benefitted from the backing of directors Anurag Kashyap, Kiran Rao, Nikkhil Advani and Vikramaditya Motwane. Written by Tejpal, Gaurav Dhingra and Swapnil Salkar-Agadbumb, Stolen stars Shubham Vardhan, Abhishek Banerjee, Mia Maelzer, Harish Khanna and Sahidur Rahaman.
In an interview, 40-year-old Tejpal described himself as an “accidental filmmaker”. A product of Mayo College in Ajmer and St Stephen’s College in Delhi, Tejpal set out to be a hockey player but instead veered towards cinema.
Tejpal worked in the Hindi film industry as an assistant director for several years, starting with Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006). Tejpal squeezed in a filmmaking course at the New York Film Academy, returning to Mumbai to develop scripts and shoot commercials.
Stolen was inspired by a lynching that took place in Assam in 2018, a horrific incident that haunts Tejpal to this day, he told Scroll. Here are excerpts from the interview.
Stolen is meant for the big screen. Why is it getting a release on a streaming platform?
It would have done quite well in theatres. But the theatrical landscape across the world has become muddled with big-ticket films and star-led vehicles.
Nobody is willing to take a punt or has a risk-taking appetite any longer. As more and more films with stars fail, this opportunity is shrinking further. In fact, it was a challenge even to get the film onto a streamer.
Why is that, considering that Stolen was well received at the Mumbai Film Festival in 2023? It is exactly the kind of movie that streaming platforms are supposed to be championing.
It’s been an uphill battle. It was eventually only because of the filmmakers who got attached to Stolen as executive producers that we managed to push the film over the line. The Indian landscape is very determined by who is attached to a film.
I always thought that if you made a good film, there would be a home for it. The streamers were so busy in the market that you were confident.
Perhaps the latest downturn has got them thinking twice about every project. Also, they have backed films that have done poorly on their platforms. That has affected everybody else’s chances as well.
Every film has its own journey. This has been our journey – a trial by fire. At this point, I am relieved that audiences will get to watch the film.
What inspired Stolen?
The film was initially a 30-page treatment born out of an incident that took place in Karbi Anglong in Assam. Two men, a musician and a businessman, were wrongly accused of being child kidnappers and were beaten to death by a mob. The videos still give me nightmares.
I had already been working as a screenwriter for smaller projects and on advertising films. I met Gaurav Dhingra during an advertising campaign. I pitched the Stolen treatment note.
The coronavirus pandemic hit soon after. It was a start-and-stop time for the industry as a whole. We managed to start the shoot in January 2023. Since then, it has been like a bullet train.
We shot for 26 days. We were at the Venice Film Festival in August that year.
Stolen is set over a night and day, and involves fast-paced action sequences. What went into its making?
It was really tough to make. A lot of work went into finding the locations.
We shot the film close to where I grew up, in Pushkar, although it isn’t set there or any other place in Rajasthan. I was looking for particular things in the locations, and I found them in Pushkar.
I’ve not yet been paid a penny on the film. But what I gave up in terms of a salary, I got back multi-fold in terms of creative freedom to shoot the way I wanted and get the actors I wanted. That’s the only way Stolen could have been made.
No traditional producer would have let me hire Shubham or Mia, or allow me to shoot long takes. Nearly 50% of the film is one for one – meaning, there are no options for the edit, and you use the scenes as they have been shot. The film was edited in a month, I think.
It was a tight schedule. Everything had to be efficient. It was such a rewarding experience that if I had to do it again the same way, I would.
What conversations did you have with the cinematographers Isshaan Ghosh and Sachin S Pillai?
The in- camera principles were very simple. I wanted the audiences to be on the same journey as my protagonists. I wanted to send viewers on a journey that felt a bit like a social horror.
The moment this was decided, every shooting decision was backtracked onto that one principle. We shot 90% of the film with 25mm and 35mm lenses. We decided to shoot only with wide-angle lenses because we wanted an immersive experience that wouldn’t be possible with long lenses because then you are looking at things from a distance.
Once you have decided on the lenses, the camera position is automatically decided. You need to get close. You’re over your main character’s shoulder. The perspective becomes very personal because you are in a small space.
Since the film is set over the period of a few hours, there are long takes. The less I cut, the more I stay with immediacy.
Things are playing out in front of your eyes. There is a crunching of time, a feeling of breathlessness or claustrophobia, which is what the men who inspired the story must have felt like when they were being chased by a mob for no good reason at all.
How do you prepare the actors for this kind of a shoot?
The five primary actors are all highly trained. Several actors are semi-professional or real persons.
Abhishek Banerjee was the first person we went to for the film. Shubham and Abhishek have been friends since college. They are super-close buddies. The chemistry that you see on the screen is real.
Abhishek is instinctual and acts from his gut. Shubham is very mental, he performs in his mind. They are different in that sense.
Mia Maelzer was cast after I saw some of her films. Harish Khanna and Sahidur Rahaman are again trained actors.
It was a collaborative process. Since we shot for such a short period, we did a lot of in-camera rehearsals in advance. The performances were always on the lower scale of the spectrum. Because the shots were complicated and long, the actors were free to do what they had to do because they couldn’t repeat the performance.
We didn’t even have a continuity supervisor. The spontaneity was maintained. If you are shooting from 25 angles and trying to match the shots later, it deadens the performances.
What is Stolen saying about the perilous encounter between urban India and rural India? Is it inadvisable to help out in a crisis?
The film does talk about the perils of having a conscience. That said, the film is about trust too. Without trust, civilisation would be nowhere, and none of our systems would work.
I didn’t want to make a nihilistic film. If you have a conscience in this country or anywhere else in the world, you could get into trouble. But have a conscience, do something.
Perhaps the film is my callout to myself. Would I stand up in such a situation? I don’t have the courage to get out onto the streets and picket against subjects, but perhaps that’s why I make movies.
The film could be viewed as privilege meeting the rest of India.
Absolutely. I come from a privileged background. I got the best education. I belong to a bubble, and I engage with the rest of the country from within that bubble.
But the inside and outside worlds intersect in weird ways. The film is about why the two worlds need to coexist, or at least be cognisant of each other.
Now that Stolen will be out soon, what are your plans?
I’m writing a feature for Mira Nair that will be set in Delhi. I’m also heading the writers’ room for the second season of Dahaad.
I have a couple of my own projects, one of which is called Umeed, a horror film about a lesbian couple trying to have a baby, written by Abhishek Banerjee, the writer of Pataal Lok and Pari. There’s another film I have been working on for a long time, a romantic thriller about a young couple in a taboo relationship.
The idea of combining genres with the subjects that I want to talk about is my sort of jam.
