Jubilee co-creator Soumik Sen: When we pitched the show to Amazon Prime, they did not have their current office in India

Along with Vikramaditya Motwane, Soumik Sen started working on Jubilee almost seven years ago. When the duo first pitched the story to Amazon Prime, the OTT platform did not have its current office in India. It took them years to carefully create the show that, Soumik feels, can compete with other magnum opuses of the global stage. In a candid chat with OTTplay, the co-creator talked about the inception of Jubilee, the ambition that pushed them to make it, and a lot more. Read on…

Thanks to you and the entire team of Jubilee, even the millennials and Genzs are googling Himanshu Rai, Devika Rani, and stories of that period. How does it feel?

People are taking screenshots, and making memes and reels. That is the reality. I find it very interesting. Jubilee is a period piece about an era when filmmaking itself was in a very nascent stage. Playback was just getting introduced. And now in this period, people are making Reels out of that. During the period when we are actually making these Reels, people have an attention span of say, one to one-and-a-half minutes and we keep on scrolling Instagram feeds. This journey that a story of 1940 is transitioning itself into the medium of 2023 is something I find very interesting.

What is the key to Jubilee’s success, according to you?

If you can tell a story of that period in the style and pacing of that period, a certain section of people might not relate to it. However, if you can make the basic conflicts of the stories universal, it will work. The story of Srikant Roy and Sumitra Devi is a period story. But ambition, love, jealousy, competition, etc, are universal. People are being able to relate to it. These stories are timeless. I think that has worked in favour of Jubilee. Even today, a young man feels the pressure of earning for the family to take care of his elderly parents. The journey of a young man who works as a regular employee and turns into a superstar overnight and tries to safeguard his stardom is the same even today. The cornerstone of it is about ambition, the advent of new technology, and stardom. The concept was the film was new. People used to think certain films are black magic. The journey of cinema from there to silent films, black-and-white representation, playback, etc, is interesting. In a way, the film industry then was like a startup. Some people were trying to put things together. It's like any other business – it has supply and demand of its own. Like a startup, these people wanted to gather funding, work towards innovations, etc. Like Srikant Ray asks to put money in his film is like a Shark Tank episode.

Did you expect this response from the audience?

Yes. That’s why it took so much time to make something that can stand the test of time. When we wrote and pitched it almost seven years ago, there were rejections. I was very sure then that this will be liked. I knew it was timeless. There is exceptional art. Some stories are time specific. I knew this story, the world and all of it will be an exceptional viewing.

Even for the Bengali film Mahalaya that I made. Initially, nobody wanted to put money into it. But a good story will always be told. The parts coming together may take time.

Both you and Vikramaditya Motwane have mentioned that Jubilee was incepted six-seven years ago. At that time, the OTT scene in India was not half as popular or strong as it is today….

We pitched Jubilee to Amazon when Amazon did not have its current office. We wrote it before that.

Also read: Jubilee web series review: Sidhant Gupta hits it out of the park in Vikramaditya Motwane’s beautiful ode to the golden era of Hindi films 

Did you pitch it like this long-run web series? Or have you thought of making it an episodic film?

It was always pitched as a web series. To give you a certain perspective, I made a very inexpensive web series for VOOT called, Badman, with Gulshan Grover. That was made even before Netflix and Amazon were started in India. Even before that, we watched Bandf Of Brothers, Bodyline, etc. We always felt that we would need a long-form web series format to tell the stories that are actually saga. And today, when shows like Game Of Thrones, Succession, Fargo, Peaky Blinders, etc, are available to watch, we knew we had to create something which is at par. You cannot say that it is good in terms of Indian content. From the beginning, I did not want to do it like that. You have to make something that is exceptional. Our outlook is deeply influenced by American studio centric. But look at the kind of work that South Korea is doing. Like Squid Game. We have to get there somehow. We have the competence. Netflix, etc, make a lot of insignificant shows. You might not enjoy those shows but they have a huge fan following because of the colonial hangover. I refuse to accept that. A story has to be bigger than the individual. An exceptionally made story can go global. If you want to tell something exceptional, you will have to be ambitious. They are I am also very thankful that Jubilee has been well supported by the makers.

Think that you are competing with Succession or Game Of Thrones. These are also very budget-centric things but the writing has to be exceptional. We all know which country is making what kind of content – we know what Scandinavian countries are working on and what is happening in Korea, Japan, or the US. Scandinavia makes a lot of noirs, and so on. They are very true to their culture. One thing that I sincerely don’t like is the tendency to remake. Why should I watch a remake when I can watch everything with subtitles? I see the point of showing the series to the people who didn’t watch the original. Then they jazz that up with stars. They are working on it. I see the work that is getting done. Israeli shows are being remade in America. I just hope Jubilee gives a major push to original stories.

During the research, you must have come across tons of references and anecdotes. How did you sort what to use and is there a chance of a spinoff of the references that you did not use?

Almost everything is available in books and magazines. The trick is to select which track to take. It was important to identify the story that we wanted to say and then choose the anecdotes and references according to that. The choice is always determined by the story you are telling. Not the other way around. Anecdotes will not determine the story. Somebody can try to make another spin-off with the things that are not used in Jubilee. But I don’t think that it will have the same fun and flavour.