Indranil Roychowdhury: There is a serious scarcity of good writers in the Bengali film industry

Filmmaker Indranil Roychowdhury, who started shooting Chhotolok – a thriller web series for Zee5 – points out the scarcity of good writers in the Bengali film industry. The script of the series that features Priyanka Sarkar, Gourav Chakrabarty, Indrani Halder, and Ushasi Ray in lead took about a year to develop. The director is known for his homework and he makes no compromise in preparing his team before he gets into shooting.

Bhalobashar Shoror-director Indranil usually pens his script with his associate writer Sugata Sinha. After the process of writing Chhotolok, he admitted that it is difficult to find another good and trained writer in Kolkata. “There is a perennial problem that we face here in Kolkata and that is the lack of trained writers. Trained scriptwriting is an important part of content creation and seriously don’t have many of them,” he said.  

Indranil also pointed out that thorough training to create script writers is important but there are not enough resources. “In the last few years, the fees of actors, directors, and DOPs went up. Writers need to be well compensated so that they don’t settle down in Mumbai. So many writers from Kolkata are settled in Mumbai,” he said. The filmmaker also emphasised the need for good training for the writers. “Training is important and there are people who can train. But the resources are not allocated there,” he said.

Indranil also believes that the current scene will eventually change because of the competition from Bangladesh. “With a limited budget, their content is brilliantly executed. I believe the scene in Tollywood will change eventually,” the director said.