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<h1 class="left">1.⁠ ⁠What was the first idea or image that sparked ‘Agra’ — was it the physical layout of the home, the protagonist’s internal state, or something else?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Agra started with the idea of the internal state. I had personally experienced a certain sexual repression growing up as a young boy, even till my late twenties. More importantly, I had seen many other young boys around me feeling trapped and unable to express themselves. This got coupled with my feelings about the lack of space that I saw around me, which left me wondering where this struggle between desire and sexuality was rooted in the Indian context. Slowly, the film revealed itself from there.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">2. How did you decide on the setting of Agra (literally the city)? Did you feel that choice influenced the film’s tone and reception?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I felt that the film had to be set somewhere in North India, as I knew that cultural context pretty intimately. Then I started exploring the characters. The more I wrote about Guru's internal voice, the more I got scared - because I realized I did not know him with the intensity that I was wanting to explore. The boys I had seen were way more kinky and suppressed. That led me to wanting to explore ways where I could recreate Guru's mental state more accurately. And the more I dived into Guru's turmoil, the more I realized that he was perhaps the sanest, living in a house full of a certain kind of madness: people around him were wed to their hypocrisies and the only boy (Guru) who could speak about them did not have the vocabulary to be able to have the necessary conversation.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">This got me thinking about this specific 'madness' - almost akin to hiding everything in plain sight. The house felt to me like a madhouse, more and more, which took me to 'Agra ka pagalkhana'. The space and city famous for that once emblematic mental asylum in our country. And lo and behold, I thought that would be the perfect metaphor for this journey. Why not set the film in Agra itself!</h1>

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<h1 class="left">3. The way you use space (house structure, shared and denied rooms) feels almost like another character in the film. How did you design the set and choose locations to convey that very strongly?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I wanted every brick and corner, every fabric within the film, every image, to be embedded with sexual imagery. So together with Saurabh Monga (DP), Parul Sondh (Production Designer) and Fabeha Khan (Costume designer) we started discussing the possibilities of phallic and vulvic symbology within the film. The props and fabric design of each object within the house, the way it was placed either to stand up straight or open up like a flower, the colours and design of the bedsheets, were all embedded with certain designs. The bathroom of the house was rebuilt with those blue tiles with the dolphins spurting out water on them. Parts of the house itself were reconstructed to shrink space and give a feeling of constant claustrophobia.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">The internet cafe we see in the film was built from scratch, on an empty plot of land right in the middle of a busy marketplace. The idea to have that narrow passage through which Guru and Priti walk, ending out in a sac-like room at the back, was designed to feel vulvic. And this principle was followed for all spaces within the film depending on whether they represented masculine or feminine harbors for us. All the costume and footwear eg., Priti's thick, layered suits with flowery designs or whether it was Guru's straight lines with his shirts, banyans or trousers were all built around the same central idea.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">4. Within the theme of sexual repression, how do you balance showing the internal psychological turmoil with external, societal pressures?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">The idea is to fill the film with both empathy and humanity. We are all a product of our social, cultural and political context. I always felt that a film about sexual repression would be difficult because it would take us into the darker areas as we explored all the characters. So I wanted to root humanity in the turmoil of all of them - fallible people doing all the wrong things. Exploring their selfish needs, personal desires and struggles as they tried to eke a stable base for themselves in their struggle to breathe against their repression. I was aware that on this journey as they did some of the dastardly things that they did, they had the potential to push an audience away.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">That's why I tried to bring the empathy through a larger context: the idea of the lack of space and the desire to create it for themselves. None of these people hence, were operating in a vacuum. They were struggling against what was around them. Pitted against it in a battle for survival. And this transactional battle, in a country of 1.4 billion people, is universal and easily 'rootable for'. This was what would create the balance, I was hoping.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">5. Can you talk about casting Mohit Agarwal as Guru — What were you looking for? How did he reflect the writing of Guru?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Mohit always had that essential, central quality for a leading man: you could not look away from him when he was performing. And to add to that, he had a sweet, innocent face that naturally extracted some sort of empathy. I thought this was crucial to Guru's casting in the film, as I knew he would be going down a path that was difficult to get redemption from. In reality, however, Mohit was quite different from Guru as a being. He was an extroverted city boy with no dearth of intimacy with the opposite sex. So after a point, Mohit and I had to sit down, together with our workshop directors Prashant Singh and Kanishka Agarwal and design specific exercises to help him get to the emotional madhouse cesspool that Guru was stuck in.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Some of the most radical ones were perhaps going on a no sex diet for about six months and watching white noise play on a laptop last thing before going to sleep and first thing after waking up.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">6. How do you think Agra fits into the conversation about masculinity in contemporary Indian cinema and at large?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I think the overall conversation around masculinity in our country is quite nascent at best. Or atleast, the more nuanced bits of it do not spread and reach the kind of people that it's trying to talk about. Popular culture or most things half radical that manage to reach a large audience, still end up talking about it in a positional way - limiting the conversation to victim and perpetrator. Which leads to just ‘othering’ the perpetrator and an almost rabid witch hunting at the end where a delivery of 'justice' is equated with 'solving the problem'.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">The reality of the world we live in is unfortunately far more complex. This is best evidenced by minimal change in crime against women or the largely unchanged patriarchy we see around us. The seeds for true change, I feel, lie in trying to understand the perpetrator from the inside. More as a human being, than as the ‘other’. If we are able to see what is truly shaping the turmoil of the perpetrator, we might be able to come closer to finding sustainable solutions. This was my attempt while filming 'Agra', and I'm hoping the film generates debate and is able to move the needle forward with regards to what we can or cannot talk about in the context of sexuality within Indian cinema.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">7. What were the challenges you faced in getting this film made and released? </h1>

<h1 class="centre">Perhaps the biggest challenge was my own self censorship and my fear for myself as a 'filmmaker'. It took me a while to find the courage to arrive at a point where I decided to say it as it is within the film. To choose the path of pure turmoil that Guru is feeling and not to look at him in a 'judgy' way from the outside. Once I started on that journey, the next major hurdle was financing. Who would fund a film like this?</h1>
<h1 class="centre">It took me two years to find the french financing and then another two to find the rest of the money in India. It was a challenging film to shoot, edit, score as I did not want to cross the very fine line between showing Guru's turmoil and condoning what he was doing. Additionally of course, the whole festival scene in itself is changing over the past decade. The best festivals around the world are going for simpler, 'happier' films with lesser nuance as they struggle to survive amidst the financial tsunami that has hit everyone. There was the additional pressure of the backlog of films for consideration at festivals post covid and the sudden need for 'hope' from cinema. I was lucky enough to find kinship towards the film from Julien Rejl at Quinzaine. Once the film did make its premiere at the festival, there was the usual grind with the OTTs, the great harbingers of hope in the wastelands of algorithmic vomit spewed at their subscribers.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">8. Did the pandemic and the delays that followed affect your vision of the film in terms of the message you wanted to put out or the production of the film itself?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">The pandemic was hard for all of the independent filmmaking community. As it was, I imagine, for anyone on the margins. For 'Agra' it meant further delays for a small film intended to be done with financial prudence. Every little unforeseen move cost the film more money. Thankfully with the collaboration of William Jehannin (UFO Production) and Siddharth Anand Kumar (Saregama Films), we were able to avoid most of the serious repercussions on the film. There was no question of compromising the vision of the film at any stage, as all three of us were clear that what we were saying was important and needed to reach a larger audience.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">9. What has surprised you most in terms of reactions from the audience to the film?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">The pandemic was hard for all of the independent filmmaking community. As it was, I imagine, for anyone on the margins. For 'Agra' it meant further delays for a small film intended to be done with financial prudence. Every little unforeseen move cost the film more money. Thankfully with the collaboration of William Jehannin (UFO Production) and Siddharth Anand Kumar (Saregama Films), we were able to avoid most of the serious repercussions on the film. There was no question of compromising the vision of the film at any stage, as all three of us were clear that what we were saying was important and needed to reach a larger audience.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">I remember a line from a young girl who spoke up in a QnA after watching the film: I don't think once the scars are carved, they ever fully heal. But perhaps, after seeing a film like this, we can address the creation of those scars and how all of us can help avoid them in the first place.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">10. Thinking back, is there anything you would change now?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Every film you make is a function of your own specific context within a given space and time. As much as the film aims to reflect space/time, I'm aware that it reflects who I am at a particular point of time too. So no, I would not change anything. The film is not mine anymore. It belongs to the audience.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">11 . What do you have to say about womanhood and the kinds of kinship that exist alongside thoughts of leaving a man?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">All the characters in the film are human beings first, and are negotiating transactions for their selfish selves. And the women hide in the background to employ their real power whether it is to get a man, or to be rid of him. My intention was always to portray them as their own creatures first and to let them have their own agency.</h1>

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