‘Smartphones have become supporting characters’For Samantha, this time, the kicking and punching didn’t come easy. The actor was suffering from dermatomyositis, a muscle inflammatory disorder, while she was filming for the series. “When I see it (the action sequences), I can’t believe I actually did it,” she says. “There were times when I had an IV in my arm in the morning and we were shooting intense combat scenes in the afternoon.” Raj butts in with a laugh, “She lay there with a drip going and outside we were discussing how to stage the scene. Then I would go into the room and ask her ‘Can you do it?’ and she said ‘I don’t know’. Next thing you know, I said ‘Action!’, and she is jumping from one place to another.” Varun adds, “I don’t think most actors on set even knew what she was going through.”Since their debut directorial 99, the 90s era seems to enthral Raj and DK as creators. Their previous show Guns and Gulaabs was also set in the pre-internet era, filled with the nostalgia of audio cassettes and STD phone booths. Honey Bunny is also set in the pre-mobile phone era. “The point was to take the tech away,” says Raj. “With everybody having a smartphone these days, surveillance has become so easy. We wanted to get away from that and make it gritty and grounded. Nostalgia was of course, a flavour.” Apart from love for the 90s, there also seems to be an undercurrent of disdain for cell phones in the works of Raj and DK. In 99, Kunal Kemmu and Cyrus Broacha play crooks who hate mobile phones but are in the business of duplicating sim cards.They have an amusing catchphrase which translates to: “Mobile’s radiation causes cancer. Put it on your ear and your brain is finished. Put it in your shirt pocket and your heart is finished and if you put it in your trouser pocket then generation…finished.” In The Family Man, the most joyous scenes are of Manoj Bajpayee shouting expletives over a phone call. “We were the first generation to use mobile phones. People used to give each other missed calls all the time because calling rates were so expensive. Now this thing (mobile) is like a computer in your hands, but back then it used to be silly like that,” says DK. “We didn’t realise,” adds Raj, before continuing, “But somewhere in our journey cell phones became supporting characters.”
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