Karan Tejpal’s Stolen hits the ground running like a train leaving a station, once you’ve reached the platform. You’re unaware if this is your train, clueless about where it’s headed, but you’re compelled to think whether you want to get on it or not. For most of us who boarded the train, we came out rewarded.
Interview | “Empathy Is Missing In Society, Hence Missing In Our Films”: Team Stolen
Stolen director Karan Tejpal, producer Gaurav Dhingra and actors Abhishek Banerjee and Shubham Vardhan speak about the film, the state of the nation, and why artists can’t carry the burden of fixing society.
Produced by Gaurav Dhingra, it’s a miracle that Stolen exists in the current circumstances of Hindi cinema—when we’re reading obituaries of Bollywood and theatrical exhibition every other day. The situation remains grim as OTT platforms turn away acclaimed films premiering in prestigious film festivals because they don’t have ‘stars’. Strangely, the most recognisable names in the film’s credit list are its four executive producers—Anurag Kashyap, Kiran Rao, Vikramaditya Motwane and Nikkhil Advani—who Dhingra brought on board to give the film one final push into the abyss of global streaming, where films/shows can disappear in a day or two. To their credit, Stolen made a noticeable splash—it emerged with glowing reviews and became the top-most watched film in regions outside India too.
It’s not been an easy road for team Stolen, since it premiered in the 2023 Venice film festival’s Orrizonti section. Almost two years after the premiere, the film has been released on Amazon Prime Video. In a politically sensitive time like this, it’s a relief to see Stolen doing justice to being a breathless genre film, without stopping to admire its own importance. It might not be wrong to also label it as a significant post-2014 film—given how clear-eyed it is in reflecting the society’s inadequacies, the labyrinth of ‘new India’ where impoverished citizens resolve their identity crisis by becoming a part of a mob.
Director Karan Tejpal (KT), producer Gaurav Dhingra (GD) and actors Abhishek Banerjee (AB) and Shubham Vardhan (SV) spoke to Tatsam Mukherjee about the film, the state of the nation, and why artists can’t carry the burden of fixing society. Edited excerpts:
I’ve heard about how you were moved by the 2018 Assam (mob lynching) case. Can you elaborate a bit on what shocked you about the case?
KT: What shocked me most immediately about the incident is how one of those men could have been me. I frequently go to remote locations for treks and hikes with friends. These guys went fishing and seemed to have similar likes and background as me. I felt scared as I used to think I was safe in my own country. How could someone wrongfully accuse one of child-kidnapping? That became the reason for me to deep-dive into the incident, and that’s how I came about related subjects like vigilante justice, child kidnappings, the rich vs poor and the lack of trust in our system.
GD: KT showed me a clip of the incident while we were working on something else. During that time, I was trying to put together a TV series on missing children in India and was also trying to become a parent. I was thinking about the kind of parent I’d become. We’d already begun developing the idea, when I saw this video on Brut of a mother sleeping at a bus station—somewhere in the heartland—and this person adjacent to her wakes up and picks up the child and leaves. So, there were many ideas that stuck together, since we were trying to become parents around that time—that’s when we got the idea of a surrogacy subplot.
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My litmus test for most movies is how efficiently the world is built and the exposition is laid on us. I thought Stolen did that exceptionally well within the first 5-10 minutes. Tell me about how you knew that intro was working, and the viewer was invested.
GD: We wanted the film to reach out to international film festivals too. As you know these days, lakhs of films are submitted to festivals, and most times critics don’t go past the first 10 minutes. Hence, we realised that the first 10 minutes are very crucial in getting the audience’s attention. So, the baby being picked up in the first scene was something always envisioned from the first draft of the script. Also, the last 10 minutes was something the audience would take away from the film, so it was intensely debated.
AB: The first thing Varun Grover said to me after coming out of a screening was, “Achha hua koi maraa nahi, varna bardaasht nahi ho paati” (I’m glad no one died, otherwise it would’ve been intolerable).
SV: Since I write, these first 10 minutes were a huge learning experience. Usually, we tend to establish the characters, and then we bring in the conflict. We were going in the opposite direction here—where we establish the conflict with the baby being picked up, and then we find out about these characters. It’s an old trap when you’re making a film about a social issue, where you start slow and establish the victim first. But certain novels tend to do this where you read the first line, and you’re in. Like (Albert) Camus’s The Outsider (1942)—“My mother died today or yesterday, I don’t remember.”
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Abhishek, you were first approached for Raman’s character. Looking back, are you grateful that you played Gautam instead? I thought one great thing you did was make Gautam sound sensible.
AB: One of the reasons why I wanted to stick to Raman’s character was because I was afraid the audience would only side with Raman as the righteous guy, who wants to help. And they would view Gautam as a douche.
It happened to me in real life, where I’ve been a part of a road mishap in Karnataka around 3-4 years back, and the situation deteriorated quickly. Thank God, some people recognised me as an actor and things calmed down. But till before that, it was really unsettling to have 50-60 people in your face, almost ready for battle. They were trying to break into my car. It was scary. And what was unfortunate was I was trying to help the person who had caused the accident—my first instinct was to go check on them, because they had a baby in the car. Never mind the damage it had caused to my car. And that’s when things went awry. Maybe, I shouldn’t have gone; maybe, I should have screamed. I was using that experience into the film.
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I bought Raman’s empathy, since I’m familiar with Shubham’s work (Eeb Allay Oo). How did he enter the casting director’s radar?
KT: Shubham was bang-on for the part of Raman. He can play any role, but I think he’s especially great here. We knew we wanted someone who had a long-standing relationship with Abhishek, and so many of his actor friends’ names were floating in the ether.
AB: It was just one phone call, I think. Shubham and I were talking and KT overheard the conversation, and he was like, “This is exactly what I want for the film.” It’s the manner in which we speak to each other—constantly berating each other. I knew there was a Raman in him. It’s not an easy role, mind you. He’s helping a stranger for no particular reason.
SV: One always wants to play a three-dimensional character. So, in my eyes, he wasn’t just a good samaritan. I, KT, Gaurav and Abhishek discussed, and we decided that Raman—knowing that he comes from privilege—also has this stubbornness, especially in the way he speaks to cops. Raman knows if he speaks in English, and asks about the FIR, there’s a power-play. I was certain the audience should feel Gautam’s irritation for Raman, he shouldn’t just be a ‘nice guy’. I wanted them to be annoyed with Raman—a stubborn younger brother, who isn’t listening to his elder brother.
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One of my favourite scenes in the film is when the locals have identified Gautam and the car and we’re watching it slowly unfold from within the car. It felt eerily like how we consume the lynching videos from behind the screen. What was the conversation that led to this scene’s conception?
KT: The reason was pretty simple actually: I wanted to film during the magic hour, which you get for 15-20 minutes around daybreak, early morning. I wanted to maintain the immediacy of the film, be as close to the real time as possible. We had to do that in a single shot—and once we were set up, all other choices were informed by this one thing that we wanted to shoot from within the car.
I liked Stolen so much is because it bats for empathy. It used to be a bare-minimum emotion. Why do you think empathy has gone missing from our films?
GD: I think it’s missing from our society, and therefore missing in our films. As a society, I think we’ve lost empathy…or we’re at least in the process of losing it.
AB: It’s a dying emotion, I guess.
SV: I think ‘empathy’ and ‘honesty’ are no longer valuable emotions today. There’s no point being a ‘nice’ person anymore; people praise someone who is ‘smarter’. I think we’ve embraced the Western philosophy where we incentivise smartness. Meanwhile, Eastern philosophy talks a bit more about empathy.
Do you guys think social media has played a part in this?
KT: Definitely.
SV: Obviously!
AB: I think social media is a place where you can blurt out your most intrusive thoughts, without seeing an immediate reaction. Most of these things, people wouldn’t have the courage to say in person.
KT: I think jealousy has increased. We didn’t know what others were up to, but now constantly having other’s achievements stare at us in our faces has resulted in more jealousy. It pisses off people—constantly seeing the comfort of other people’s lives, and not having it in your own life.
Do you think technology has made our stomachs stronger to consume misery?
KT: It’s probably desensitised us, we’ve become okay watching misery and not reacting.
SV: I think the main emotion social media perpetuates is that of violence. I remember one of the earliest influencers on YouTube in India (actor Varun Pruthi) used to prank poor people, where he would tell them that I’ll give you Rs 10,000, and the poor person would cry and hug him. This became ‘content’. It reached a point where people began to see these things only as circus and radically began not believing sob stories online. They emotionally shut down, because no one really wants to be manipulated like that.
AB: It’s a news channel psychology, right? In the late 90s, when India got its first 24*7 news channels, it was the beginning of the end of news. You start catering to the consumer, and then you’re creating news. We’re all individual channels right now—with 10, 500 or five million followers. Everyone is trying to cater to that viewership. Everyone wants to feel validated at the end of the day—especially in a country like India, where the validation isn’t coming through work.
SV: The trust has been obliterated…
It took two years after the Venice premiere for the film to come to an OTT platform. Can you give me a basic idea of the journey of the film?
GD: We wanted to release the film in India, but we were also making it with the rest of the world in mind. It just so happened that the market crashed in 2023, and I remember between Toronto (International Film Festival) and Venice (International Film Festival) only one film was acquired, and that too it was by Richard Linklater film (Hit Man, 2023, by Netflix). We had offers for foreign territories like the UK or Japan, unlike on Angry Indian Goddesses (2015), which we sold in nine days and got a worldwide distribution deal. The problem with releasing it in a foreign territory is that it will reach India through piracy channels.
The challenge with releasing in India was that theatres wanted an event film. To compete with those, I’d need a marketing budget of Rs six-seven crores at least. That would be detrimental to the project because we would never be able to recover that amount. So, we had to sit on it and as soon as the market got slightly better, they themselves called me. The moment we got global distribution—which was the initial aim—we wanted to go even bigger. We got four EPs because we wanted to reach out to their audiences too.
One of my takeaways from Stolen was if injustice happens in front of you, don’t look away. Are you hopeful the audience will listen?
AB: Anytime I do a film which has something to do with our socio-political structures, I think the best takeaway would be conversation. Some audiences will watch it for the thrill, others will take something else away from the film. Someone from MP was telling me how they enjoyed the guy being thrashed by the mob and I was surprised to hear someone enjoy it. It’s hard to predict what someone takes away from a film.
SV: I was going through the comments under the film, and someone over there said, “My moral from the film is, don’t get involved.” And it triggered a conversation, where someone responded to him, “Have you lost your mind? Did you not understand the point of the film?” and it sprawled into a long thread. As Abhishek said, I think this is the best we can do. We need to change the culture here slightly—artists can raise questions, they can’t provide answers. We should stop cornering filmmakers and actors and asking them about a crisis in the country.
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