The moral choices of characters may make them unlikeable for audiences: Neeraj Udhwani on Maska

When the countrywide lockdown was first announced in March, filmmaker Neeraj Udhwani’s directorial debut Maska (2020) was released on Netflix on 27 March. The film, starring Prit Kamani, Nikita Dutta, Shirley Setia, Manisha Koirala and Jaaved Jaaferi, told the story of the Irani family which held on to family traditions and a business in Mumbai.

Udhwani, who has previously written the scripts for Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji (2011) and Mere Dad Ki Maruti (2013), spoke about how he wrote the screenplay for his directorial debut in an online conversation with other first-time filmmakers Honey Trehan, Anvita Dutt and Sharan Sharma, moderated by Anuj Malhotra, critic and founder of the film collective Lightcube.

“For Maska, the germ always came first,” he explained in the course of the Zoom chat. "I was interested in talking about this ability versus dream, what you are good at versus what you want to do. So this conflict is what I wanted to tell and then because I knew what I wanted to say, the story came to me.

“I particularly set it in the Parsi community because Parsis in films have always been caricatured [and] laughed at,” he continued. “But actually they are a very smart, industrious community, so I wanted to bring out that part also, and represent them as authentically as possible.”

After the film’s digital premiere, Udhwani said, a lot of people who had watched it wrote to him about his ‘unlikeable’ lead character, Rumi Irani, played by Prit Kamani. Udhwani understood why the audience might have felt so, as Rumi does some morally wrong things, from lying to his mother to cheating on his girlfriend.

“As writers, we don't judge our characters, but the audience always judges them,” he explained. “While I was writing [Rumi], I was writing him as this lost 18-year-old boy who doesn't know what he wants, so he is just following his heart [and] getting lured by temptations, and succumbing to them.

“We try to look at the world from our protagonist's point of view and try to write their story,” he went on. “But sometimes, some of the moral choices that they make may make them unlikeable to the audience. Even though he is the protagonist, he is a flawed guy in that sense. He doesn't have a strong moral fibre because he doesn't know who he is. That is the discovery [and] the journey.”

Maska is now available on Netflix. Catch the full conversation featuring Udhwani and filmmakers Anvita Dutt, Honey Trehan and Sharan Sharma below.