Sanya Malhotra is an amazing actor who brings so much to her character, says Achin Jain | EXCLUSIVE

From Vasan Bala’s debut film ‘Peddlers’ to the Academy award-winning Danish Tanovic’s ‘Tigers’, Achin Jain has been a key force to making ‘Sikhya Entertainment’ a global brand that it has become today. His filmography includes the award winning ‘The Lunchbox’, ‘What Will People Say’ (Norway’s official Oscar entry for 2018), the Tamil superhit ‘Soorarai Pottru’ (2020) on Amazon Prime, ‘Pagglait’ (2021) on Netflix and most recently the Oscar winning documentary, ‘The Elephant Whisperers’ and ‘Kathal’ with Sanya Malhotra.

OTTplay met up with Achin Jain for an exclusive interview, wherein he took us through his journey from ‘Peddlers’ to ‘The Elephant Whisperers’.

How has the journey for Sikhya been post the massive win at the Oscars?
I would say that, post Oscars, the main thing is the immense love and the appreciation that we have received. The honour has been so humbling and amazing for us. I think the journey for us to tell the story remains the same. So, for us I would say, it is a by-product of that journey, only that we have an Oscar. So, we need to stay true to that journey and keep telling stories in the best possible manner.

When you and Guneet collaborated together, what were the prime things you both wanted to achieve in the entertainment business? And how has this evolved or changed ever since?
When we started, I don’t think we really had any specific goals on what we want to achieve in the entertainment business. I think now, we can reflect back and say there are reasons we made those decisions that we made. It is because of our common taste, our space, our tribe, the kind of film makers, the kind of stories that resonated with us. But I think when we started off, we had limited opportunity. So, for us, I think it was just to tell stories. But, I think, over a period of time, we have realized that what we enjoy the most is telling stories which have an impact, stories with social change and stories with messages without being preachy. So, for us, I would say that we have evolved in understanding what we really wanted to say back then. It is just amazing to find your own voice in the journey.

What do you think of the current trend that films and OTT have been sort of competing with each other? How do you see the future pan out for the Hindi film industry overall?
I think we are living in a very interesting time. OTT is the reason that our industry survived during the COVID pandemic. I think there has been way too much content that we have been making and it has become a challenge of quantity over quality. So, I think, right now, everyone is contemplating and figuring out how do you make content for the cinema, how do you bring those movies to the cinema which can bring the audience back. There's a big behaviour change that has happened. Everyone today is well versed with the world of OTT and there's way too much content for one to choose from the OTT. So, the challenge is to bring people back to theatres. With mega film releases like ‘Barbie’, ‘Oppenheimer’, ‘Mission impossible’ and Karan Johar’s ‘Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani’, you can see that people want to go back to theatres.

You guys have worked with Sanya Malhotra on two projects. Does that mean that you guys like to champion actors and filmmakers?
Sanya Malhotra is an amazing actor who brings so much to her character. I don’t think we can imagine ‘Pagglait’ with anyone else apart from Sanya. I think we have always been backing the first-time director, the young new voices and the young actor. The whole point of the storytelling is dependent. The key factors that are involved in storytelling are the filmmaker and the actor. So how do you champion them is very important. If you give them the freedom to express themselves freely, it will surely work in a big way.

What’s your take on the strike that took place in Hollywood recently about the writers and actors? Do you think there needs to be a central code of conduct framed in Bollywood too?
We definitely need a central code of conduct in our country too. We need standardization of processes, standardization of pay scale. It depends on the negotiation of a person and also the power position of a person. We have certain unions for our technical group, but I think there are a lot of gaps, for which there is a lot of work that we still need to do. A big change has happened over a decade, but I think, there is still a long way that we have to go.

What does the future hold for you?

We are working on different stories; different mediums and we are really excited with our developments. We are in the process of shooting an interesting web series called ‘Gyaarah Gyaarah’ which will be released on Zee 5 later this year. Besides that, there is an intimate documentary on Honey Singh that we are working with Netflix on.