Vikramaditya Motwane On How Netflix Fails To ‘Push Indian Content’: It’s Your Duty To Push Original Indian Content

Apart from Sacred Games and Jubilee, on which he served as the showrunner, Motwane was also one of the producers on Netflix’s Decoupled.

Nivedita

Updated on: 8 June 2023 6:35 am

Vikramaditya Motwane

Director Vikramaditya Motwane says that OTT platform Netflix isn’t doing enough to push original Indian stories. Motwane’s Sacred Games was the first Netflix Indian original that made a mark in the Indian OTT space.

Motwane, in a chat with The Streaming Show podcast, said, “Yes, Rana Naidu and Class have done extremely well for you (Netflix), but that’s Ray Donovan and Elite. It’s not original Indian content.” The filmmaker said that “you can do remakes” but “it’s your duty, your responsibility to push original Indian content out there. We are always going to go out there and find the quickest solution possible because you need to deliver something to the streaming service.”

He acknowledged that things need to be delivered in a few months’ time, and it is in those restrictive circumstances that the streamer might think, “let’s get that remake and that format and end up doing it.” Motwane said that with producing remakes for OTT, “you are back to exactly where you were with films, exactly where you were with television and that’s not a good place to be.”

Apart from Sacred Games and Jubilee, on which he served as the showrunner, Motwane was also one of the producers on Netflix’s Decoupled. The Udaan director said that he was involved in a “creative” capacity on the show in terms of giving feedback on the scripts, and making phone calls when the team needed to be made. He shared that he found the scripts to be “fantastic,” but he felt, “at the end of the day, there were too many cooks in that room.”

He said, “There’s too many opinions, too many ways to do it. There was the sense that we need to be able to homogenise this show for a larger audience as opposed to letting it be this beast that kind of offends people, which is what the scripts were. That’s why I liked them. I loved the scripts because, ‘Wow. This is so interestingly offensive in a funny sort of way’. But the show at the end of the day wasn’t that offensive. (What was on paper) wasn’t exactly what we saw on screen and there are multiple reasons for that.” He concluded by saying, “I could go into them but I don’t want to point any fingers right now.”

Decoupled, which released in 2021, starred R Madhavan and Surveen Chawla. The show wasn’t renewed for a second season.