Gehraiyaan: Shakun Batra opens up about receiving conflicting responses to Deepika Padukone’s film

Gehraiyaan has certainly got people talking, although they don’t always seem to have good things to say about, according to director Shakun Batra. The filmmaker recently opened up about some of the polarizing responses he has received about the film, saying that some of them even made him question his own rationality.

In an interview with Sucharita Tyagi, the filmmaker talked about how through his film, he had wanted to get a conversation started. Now that people had started talking about the film on such a massive scale, he realised that he could not correct how audiences chose to interpret the film. He said that the views about the film were poles apart at times, and he had no choice but to ‘take it all in’.

Batra revealed how one person chose to express their disagreement with the film by sending him an email, saying abusive things to him and how the film should not have been made. Another person, who is a psychologist, had contacted Batra asking for the filmmaker’s reasoning behind the characters in the movie. Such wildly different responses got the filmmaker thinking whether or not he, and the audiences, were rational.

The filmmaker also opened up on why the decision was made not to call the film a ‘domestic noir’, pointing to the shift in the film’s tone that happens in its second half. He also talked in length about one of the most ‘pivotal’ and emotional scenes in the film, involving Deepika Padukone and Naseeruddin Shah. The scene had originally been much shorter, he said, but it was redone after the director received notes from his partner as well as his co-writer.

Gehraiyaan is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.