Karan Boolani’s Bollywood directorial debut, Thank You For Coming, is all set to hit the theatres this Friday, October 6. The film is headlined by Bhumi Pednekar and features Shehnaaz Gill, Kusha Kapila, Dolly Singh and Shibani Bedi in prominent roles. The film uses the female orgasm as a medium to highlight the coming of age of modern women amid myriad everyday challenges.
Thank You For Coming is a quintessential Rhea Kapoor-produced entertainer and is written by Radhika Anand and Prashasti Singh. This begs the question: in a film about women, written by women and produced by women, where does Karan’s voice as a male director factor in?
Karan, who is also Rhea’s husband, exclusively spoke to News18 Showsha recently and shared, “While all the girls brought in their life experiences to the film, it was my responsibility to tell that story. As a man, I think of it as a story, before anything else, and then find a way to not let my experiences interfere with the storytelling. As a storyteller, I have to empathize with every character, even if I may not know what it’s like. I don’t have to be a murderer to make a film about murder.”
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Karan shared that he drew inspiration from Rhea Kapoor’s famous girl gang to understand what makes female friendships nuanced and as essential to a woman’s life as they are. “This film has been like spying on her (Rhea’s) WhatsApp group. I noticed that Rhea’s friends would come and share their most shameful, embarrassing, personal moments with each other with such humility, grace and confidence. But my boys have a different approach to it and I embraced this difference through making this film,” he told us.
Celebrating female friendships is not new for Rhea, who has often depicted this core relationship in most women’s lives with films like Aisha and Veere Di Wedding. While both films featured her sister Sonam Kapoor as one of the leads, Thank You For Coming is an exception. Talking about taking this different route for the film’s casting, Karan said, “I wanted people who were familiar with the situations in the film and maybe did not have a pre-existing relationship on screen with the audience. I wanted somebody who could bring a lot of their real-life challenges and problems to the story because we also drew from very real-life situations.”
With more social media personalities now stepping into films, the hard-to-reach Bollywood dream has seemingly come closer to a DM’s distance. For Karan, “It’s the natural progression of things.” He said, “I think it’s an opportunity to find someone who has stories to tell. It’s not just a gag, they have something to say.”
Thank You For Coming also features Karan’s father-in-law Anil Kapoor in an interesting role. Karan was all praises about Anil and said, “AK has had such a long and illustrious career because he has always pushed himself into spaces and roles which have challenged him. So, he’s just a joy to work with.” However, Karan added, “We all have our differences, it’s not smooth sailing all the time but I think we respect each other and that’s at the core of it all.”
Karan’s full-fledged Bollywood debut has been a long time coming. Now, he feels that he has “got it right with this script”. Karan’s optimism was fuelled by the positive reaction that the film got during the Gala premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September.
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Talking about the same, the director shared, “We just took a chance. It’s a commercial comedy film so it was a real outside shot… the team was unaware that I had done this quietly on the side. Once we got in, they told us that we would be giving you a Gala premiere, which was even more intimidating because we had to fill up 1700 seats in one theatre.”
“People came out in large numbers to see it and there were long rush lines. We have these rush lines where the tickets are sold on the same day. I think we had one of the longest rush lines of the festival,” he added.
Produced by Rhea Kapoor and Ektaa Kapoor, the film features the story of a 32-year-old single woman who has never had an orgasm. When she finally experiences her first orgasm one night, she cannot recall whom she had it with.
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