Over his 14-year filmography, after making a thrilling debut with A Wednesday (2008), Neeraj Pandey has established himself as one of the few storytellers in commercial Hindi cinema who wants to root his films in reality, rather than escape it. A Wednesday was a thriller that took inspiration from the 2006 Mumbai train bombings. Pandey made his streaming debut with Special OPS, which drew on the 2001 attack on Parliament. His biopic on cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni, M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016), cherry-picked incidents from his life but shot extensively in real-life locations where the cricketer had grown up. As both a producer and a director, Pandey is interested in the world around him. His noteworthy films — which he often writes and produces — blend fact and realism with fiction and the gloss of commercial cinema. “From our first film, we had a sense of responsibility in terms of staying true to the events and incidents,” Pandey said when asked about self-censorship and the prevailing anxiety about depicting contemporary realities. “It still remains, and so does my responsibility as a storyteller — how people respond to these depictions and representations was not our prerogative, and never will be.”
Talking about his early filmmaking influences, Pandey said he grew up loving every kind of film and among his favorites were Billy Wilder, Vijay Anand and Frank Capra. He described these directors as “surrogate teachers” and said Satyajit Ray was a particularly big influence. “I was probably biased towards him, given that I was born and brought up in Kolkata, but the ease with which he could straddle different genres was marvelous. If you look at a Nayak (1967) and a Pather Panchali (1955), it would be hard to guess both these films are made by the same filmmaker,” he said.
Pandey’s latest project is Khakee: The Bihar Chapter, which will be available to stream on Netflix from November 25th, is a rustic crime drama set in the hinterlands of Bihar. Directed by Bhav Dhulia, the show stars Avinash Tripathy and Karan Tacker in lead roles, alongside featuring some formidable names in the supporting cast like Abhimanyu Singh (whose voice overpowers the trailer), Vinay Pathak, Ravi Kishan and Ashutosh Rana. “The origin point for ‘Khakee’ was my many interactions with Amit Lodha, a renowned IPS [Indian Police Service] officer and the author of the book ‘The Bihar Diaries’, which this show is based upon,” said Pandey. “We first met around 2017, and as Amit started telling me about his experiences in Bihar as a police officer, I became more and more curious and eventually suggested that he write a book about his experiences. In fact, we had bought the adaptation rights even before the book was published.”