'Varun Was Hanging, Upside Down For An Hour'

'Varun was so exhilarated with the intense physical action sequences.'
'Samantha is very agile.'
'I don't know how they did it. It's really hard.'

Content is king, and so the most important job of a film or Web series is the writer's.

Yet, this is the most overlooked profession in the film industry.

But Sita R Menon has got her due, after working with Directors Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK ever since their directorial debut Flavors in 2003.

Before the trio's new project Citadel: Honey Bunny arrives on November 7, Sita gives us all the news about the show.

Sita was the Entertainment Editor at Rediff.com before she became a star writer.

In a multi-part interview, she tells Patcy N/Rediff.com, "Right at the beginning, the Russos asked me to tell our story in our own way, in whatever genre we wanted. Right there, there was freedom. We got to infuse the story with our own humour, our own touch, our own subversive ways of telling the same trope."

How did Citadel with the Russo Brothers happen?

In 2019, Jennifer Salke, who led Amazon Studios, met Raj and DK with an offer. She had planned this global project for which she had roped in the Russo Brothers.

They planned this global spy-verse and were looking for film-makers from all around the world to partner with.

They called the US series the 'mothership' with such points all around the world, like Italy, India, Mexico, France, Brazil...

Raj and DK got excited (about the Indian version) and promptly came and told me about it.

They briefed us that the US show was headlined by Priyanka (Chopra), and her character is called Nadia.

We started jamming about what we can do.

For us, it was extremely easy because Nadia was the most emotional and synergistic point of connect into the larger universe.

We decided to do something about Nadia's childhood and growing up years.

So I said, let's not do Nadia, let's create new characters so that everybody can invest and dig into new people.

The US would have already explored Nadia, so we decided to do the show about Nadia's mother.

That's when the whole James Bond analogy started. Everybody knows who James Bond is, but nobody knows who his parents are.

The US series shows Nadia in a particular light, with certain characteristics and a certain oomph. She's supposed to be an elite agent.

That made it exciting for us to go back in time and ask, how did she become like that?

Who were her parents? We created these two characters, Honey and Bunny.

The show-runners loved them.

Today's Honey Bunny story is very far from where we started off because that's usually how stories are.

But the core and heart remains.

Honey was always this daredevil mother who had to raise her daughter a certain way.

We knew that the parents had to have been separated because that builds drama.

I always had this idea of this single mother raising her child to be this warrior.

The trailer is so filmi, and looks unlike a Raj and DK product.

It's cinematic, rather than filmi.

This is possibly the most commercial or cinematic story we've written.

We've paid our homage to Hindi cinema. There are a lot of cinema nuances in the series.

We had to place the story logically in the '90s since Nadia belongs to the present day.

The '90s is also the backdrop for Guns & Gulaabs, Raj and DK's other series, for which I was consulted upon.

You worked with an international team during Citadel. How different was it?

Right at the beginning, the Russos asked me to tell our story in our own way, in whatever genre we wanted. Right there, there was freedom.

We got to infuse the story with our own humour, our own touch, our own subversive ways of telling the same trope.

We would do our own brainstorming.

It took many, many, drafts between the three of us, which were then sent to all the stakeholders, and there are many -- There's Amazon India, Amazon US, Gozie AGBO, the resource company.

It's a tent-pole project for everybody involved.

If there was stuff they didn't understand -- for example, there might be some inside jokes on Farzi -- we had to make it clearer.

What is the process that Raj, DK and you work on? How do you decide who does what? How did you write the action scenes?

Like how we always work. I'm not a talker. Raj and DK talk and when they talk, their ideas come out.

I don't do that.

I go home, shut down and write.

I can't think when I talk. I think when I type.

For Citadel, I did a lot of the heavy lifting, in terms of the writing.

I'm the main writer on this project.

I would write the whole thing and they would give feedback.

As for action writing, it did not come easy. It was very hard.

This is the first time I'm writing action.

The thing with action stories is that nobody takes action very seriously. It's not like you will see an action movie in an awards show.

So our effort was not to make this an award-winning project.

But given the fact that it's a spy action drama, we had to make it unique.

Were you present on the sets during the shoot?

Yes. Earlier, during the shoots of 99, Shor In The City I could not go on set because I was working with Rediff and other jobs.

As long as I had a day job, I wasn't able to be involved on set.

But since I quit, I've been on the set of every project.

I couldn't do it with Farzi because it was during COVID and had a restricted number of people on set.

What were Varun and Samantha like on set?

Varun has never done action before Citadel.

He reached out to DK, saying, 'I'd love to do an action story.'

When DK told him about this project, he jumped in.

I remember the first time we went to his house to narrate the story. He showed us these amazing videos where he had done these parkour-type flips. He's a huge UFC and MMA fan.

He turned out to be far more knowledgeable than we thought.

Because he's a dancer, he is very agile. His body is very flexible.

His first shot was at night, in an abandoned building, where he had to do his spy thing and infiltrate that place. He was hanging, upside down, for more than an hour.

He was so exhilarated with these intense physical action sequences.

Samantha had already proved her mettle in The Family Man which is why we saw her as the best choice as Honey.

She has to single-handedly take on agents, so there were lots of action sequences.

She trains very hard in a personal capacity.

She has a highly regimented routine and is very agile.

I don't know how they did it. It's really hard.

But both of them came through very well.