Director Vikramaditya Motwane has a penchant for the usual. He taps into everyday, innocuous situations to make films that expose the oft-ignored but equally relevant tale. He did it with Udaan by examining a complicated father-son relationship. He did it again with Sacred Games, laying bare the vulnerablity of a cop and the complexity of evil. He showed the human side of a thief in Lootera. Now, he has stayed true to form with his new OTT film, CTRL, which looks at how technology is gradually transforming from a tool to a nemesis. Excerpts from an interview: Your latest show on Netflix, CTRL, explores the dark side of technology. How did the idea originate?The intention behind the thriller is to show how we have been living our lives lately. And, doing it through the medium of a laptop seemed like an interesting way of telling the story. I wanted to show how we end up getting controlled by the very things we thought we had control over. Of course, when we were writing it in 2020, it felt futuristic. We didn’t realise that developments in AI would be this fast. So now, when the show is releasing, it has become a sort of documentary. There is a lot of talk about why people share personal content online; whether it is simply for the joy of sharing, or if they do it for profit. CTRL is a way of bringing that conversation to the forefront, but in the guise of a fun, exciting thriller.CTRL is touted to be (actor) Ananya Panday’s best performance so far. Was she your first choice?The reason I cast Ananya was because I loved her in Gehraiyaan. She was phenomenal. The discussion about nepo-kids always getting a chance is a usual topic of discussion, and it is wonderful when such assumptions are broken. I think that’s what happened with Gehraiyaan. I was impressed with her, and when I started working on CTRL, I called Shakun Batra (Gehraiyaan director). He had only the nicest things to say about Ananya. On set too, I discovered that she wasn’t just hardworking, but also got the pulse of her character on point. She was nervous, too, which is a great thing because she wants to prove herself.
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