Murder Mubarak on Netflix | Homi Adajania: Working with Dimple Kapadia is like a bad habit I don't want to get rid of

Why did you take on this adaptation as a director?

The writers Suprotim Sengupta and Gazal Dhaliwal came to me with the script and their fantastic title of Murder Mubarak. They had carved out the script from the book and were very clear that the lens would be of a whodunnit and it wouldn't spread into any other space.

I heard the narration. It was convoluted and the harder it is, the more fun I have. What drew me was that while I'm familiar with the world, it's a very unique space because it's such a niche thing - little colonial clubs barely exist anymore. I haven’t seen anything else set in this world and, in that sense, it was new and yet I know it so well.

Of course, I sat with the writers and worked on certain changes or certain character graphs, etc., which is a natural organic process of going from draft number one to draft number 30, or whatever it may be. Credit goes to Gazal and Suprotim for all the breadcrumbs, red herrings and tropes of a whodunnit which need to be there.

The tropes of a whodunnit and the sort of crafting of a whodunit can be formulaic - with certain red herrings, a murder off the bat and then keeping the audience constantly guessing as to who the killer is. What do you think makes this genre so engaging?

I love the genre. The level of audience participation is much higher in this genre. Therefore, the breadcrumbs, the red herrings are all tools that you use in your narrative.

There's the trope where at the end the detective sits in front of all the suspects and tells them all why each one is not the murderer, which is such a bizarre thing. I mean, if you want to urgently crack a case, then you shouldn’t be sitting at leisure in a big room with everyone saying, by the way, you did this, but you were there that night, and therefore you're not the murderer. Quite unnecessary, but very necessary in a whodunnit.

There are fixed things you need to do - keep the audience guessing, definitely weigh in a little more on one suspect over all the others, and then take the audience down another gully while your murderer is doing something else. But if a viewer goes back and rewatches, they will notice the breadcrumbs, but it is told in such a way that the viewer doesn’t guess. That's the fun of it.

The film has a massive ensemble with Dimple Kapadia, who you've worked with so many times, on one end and Pankaj Tripathi, who has his own way of expression, on the other. Then there is the younger cast such as Sara Ali Khan and Aashim Gulati. As a director, how do you match all these different acting styles, skills and experience?

I wouldn't say it's overly challenging. It's how you approach it. I feel each actor is different and you need to be very aware of that. You need to know how to work with the actor to get the optimum performance out of each of them.

You cannot speak to one actor the way you speak to another, because the communication won't be as effective. You have to figure out what they need, what will allow them to bloom to that level. Keeping a tab on that is a bit difficult, considering I can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. And there are a lot of characters in Murder Mubarak.

Working with Pankaj Tripathi was a joy. Brijendra Kala is such a lovely guy. All the actors brought their A game to the table. Firstly, they all know I'm quite ruthless. I don't take more than three takes. The actor preps to whatever level, but I want to keep it organic. There's a certain kind of freestyling going on and everyone knows that they better bring their A game to the shoot. When you're working with this calibre of talent, then you notch it up. They feed off each other, which improves the overall performances.

What can you tell us about ACP Bhavani Singh, Pankaj Tripathi’s character?

They refer to him as the maths professor. The whole idea was to keep him very unassuming and unlike any police officer, to the extent where sometimes people think the assistant is the cop, because he wears a uniform, and that Bhavani is the assistant or the driver, till he starts speaking. He’s a little quirky, doesn't come directly to the point, speaks in a slightly poetic way. What's lovely about Pankaj is when you're reading with him, he will, in his most polite and lovely way, suggest what if I said this instead of this, at which point the whole room has fallen down laughing. And he quietly says okay, I’ll try it like this.

Can you make a movie or show that doesn’t feature Dimple Kapadia?

I no longer can. It’s my cross to bear. We first did Being Cyrus together. The second film, Cocktail, I thought maybe that was a coincidence. In the third one, Finding Fanny, I had not really thought about it. By the fourth one, she was a habit and you realise she just has to be part of every project. She's like a bad habit that I don't want to get rid of.

How did you cast Karisma Kapoor, who is incredibly selective about what she does?

I had almost forgotten that she was still acting because she's so selective. When I was trying to cast for Shenaz, Panchami Ghavri, the casting director, suggested I speak to Karisma. We weren’t sure she'd do it, because it's an ensemble film where everyone has an almost equal amount of screen time and the only thing tying them together is the detective. Once I thought about it and met her, it was a no-brainer. She went through the whole thing and said it’s not something she has done before so let's have fun and do it.

Between your last feature and this one, you did a series. How does the narrative pace, filming, the expansiveness compare?

A series wears you down to the bone. But you sink your teeth in much deeper. The experience of making Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo is one of the best experiences I've ever had. Whether it was with my cast and crew or just living those three months in the salt flats and the deserts.

You don't have the luxury to invest that deeply into a 40-day shoot as you can when you do it in a 90-day shoot, for example. There is the luxury of making a way more nuanced and complicated character graph because your characters have time to actually slow burn.

In a movie, you need to be pretty straight off the bat saying, this is the character, this is where the arc is going to go and that's where the character is going to end up. In a series, the theory is the same, but the way you navigate it is a little more complex, because you're living so much longer with those characters.

So what next? Can we expect a new season of ‘Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo’?

I'm done, I want to go diving. Murder Mubarak came back-to-back with the series, and writing of season two of Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo is going on. What I do know is that I'm open to working more and not taking big sabbaticals in between because I'm very clear about how I want to work and the whole experience is much lighter and fun for me. I hope to be working at a more frequent pace. Having said that, I have no clue what I'm doing next.