Raj Nidimoru Shares How Anupam Mittal Got On Board To Produce His And DK’s First Film

Raj, how did your first project materialize?

It took us almost four or five years to get that film going because we were new to Mumbai city. It was the first time we had landed in Mumbai at that point and we didn’t know anyone, so all we knew was we could write a script. So we wrote 99, Shor in the City and Go Goa Gone, I think. All three stories we decided as engineers aspiring to be filmmakers that if we write three scripts,at least one of them will get made. There’ll be more chances of one of them getting made. So 99 was our first one and we just didn’t know anyone.

How did you convince a producer to back 99?

Just to get contacts, make contacts, approach any actor, producer, it was taking forever and we had zero clue how to go about it, plus we looked like we were from another world or something because we didn’t look like we belonged in Mumbai at that point. So they didn’t quite know who we were. They just knew that the script was quite fun and funny and fresh and it was new, something they hadn’t read before.

99 had no reference point?

But that kind of proved to be tough and good at the same time because there is no precedent. So we couldn’t really reference a film saying it’s like that film. So it was tougher than we thought, much tougher. We just knew Anupam Mittal, who was the CEO of Shaadi.com. And he said, I’ll produce a film. And so we were friends from before we had made a film. So he said, I’ll do it.

Was it tough getting that impressive cast with no experience in feature filmmaking?

Again, no connection. So no way we could get to people. No way to prove that we’re filmmakers really. So we decided to make a short film and we made a film based on a show in the city. We had a full script, but we decided to make one piece of it first. So we went and shot for like over a weekend.That short film came out very well. And that gave us the calling card that we wanted. It went into lots of nice festivals and all that. And we started showing people in Bombay and see who would bite. And based on that, we started casting at that point. And before we knew, we had a really cool ensemble cast with Kunal Khemu, Vinod Khanna, Boman Irani. And it was so cool. Such a nice… Cyrus Broacha was doing a feature film for the first time, I think, at that point. So it was really fun.

Was it tough putting 99 out there?

The release of it was another big pain because we didn’t have money for marketing. So we didn’t even have money to, I think we didn’t even have newspaper ads. We had like some ten hoardings in the city and that was it. We really didn’t have any more money for anything else. No TV spots, no radio spots, nothing. So it just opened there, sat there.

The opening must have crushed you and DK?

We thought it sank on the first day because nobody knew about it. It was just, it opened just about barely okay. But then it sustained. We actually went through a low on Friday. We gave up and then by Sunday it was turning around. We went to nice packed theaters on Sunday, did a bunch of tour of a bunch of theaters and realized, oh my God, it’s pretty full. And then it sustained after that. The word of mouth was pretty strong and it ran for many weeks after that. And yeah, and it was, we experienced all kinds of emotions in that one film.

So a happy ending?

Yeah, at the end of it, it was a happy ending in terms of how the film ran in theaters. And then it had a great afterlife also. People still fondly remember, recollect such sweet messages we get whenever we have 99 anniversary. And it is a big one for us. Like the, I think the trailer says that the difference between 99 and a hundred is one. It’s just one, but it’s a big one. So yeah, it’s really, really fun to look back at it. So much happened with the sets, so much we learned as filmmakers. We grew as a team.

You had quite a team?

Three of us came together, DK, Sita Menon and I. And yeah, we’ve remained together since. The filming was great fun. This was the only film we shot on film, Super 35, that was like, we had to shoot on the film, even though digital was very much happening . We wanted to shoot on a film because we knew, kind of knew that was the last chance we had. So we shot on film. It was so cool; all kinds of things we did at that point. So that was a really, really enjoyable first. The best part about 99 is that we didn’t know the rules to play by. We just made what we wanted to make. All the first three films that we wrote in the beginning of our combined career, we just wrote what we wanted to make what we wanted to make. We saw that there was really no crime comedy out there per se, when we came into Bombay. And we realized we should do something that’s not out there. Hence 99. So and it was a bit of a historical fiction in a weird way that we decided that we create a backstory as to how it linked to the real betting scandal at that point, the whole match fixing scandal that was going on earlier. So it was an original idea. It was fun to make something like that.

Couldn’t have been easy cracking an idea so sensitive, like walking on grass?

We took a long time to crack the script because we were pretty much writing the real first Hindi feature film. So we had to really figure out how to write structure, a script, how to create a climax. It took us a while, but it was a very satisfying process. While doing it, we started jumping scripts. I don’t know why we did that, but it kind of proved good for us. And we continue to do that. So while we were writing 99, we were writing Shore In The City and Go Goa Gone at the same time. Everything was in different stages of writing.