Wanted to make sure I'm not stepping on any toes: Nagesh Kukunoor on new series 'The Hunt'

New Delhi, Jul 10 (PTI) As a filmmaker, anything remotely political is a no-go zone for Nagesh Kukunoor but he says what drew him to "The Hunt - The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case" was that it came across as a true crime thriller.

The series, which debuted last week on streaming service SonyLIV and has garnered good reviews, delves into the aftermath of one of India’s most tragic historical events -- the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi on the night of May 21, 1991, at a poll rally in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur.

Adapted from author Anirudhya Mitra's 2022 book "Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi's Assassins", the show follows the Special Investigation Team of the CBI that cracked the assassination plot, identified the assassins and chased the mastermind, Sivarasan, to his final hideout.

"I had never ventured into the true crime space ever, so it was exciting to actually adapt a book. I had done a little bit of adapting, but it was more articles for 'Modern Love Hyderabad'. But this was a completely different format... an event has happened and you are actually going to now dramatise it," Kukunoor told PTI in an interview.

"The thing that always makes something like this more challenging is because it's a sensitive topic, you want to make sure that you're not stepping on any toes. You're trying to do right by all while telling and engaging in dramatic stories," he added.

The project was brought to Kukunoor, a director who created a space for himself with deeply personal stories like "Hyderabad Blues", "Rockford", "Iqbal" and "Dor", by Sameer Nair, the CEO of production banner Applause Entertainment.

"Sameer and I are good friends. He pitched this book to me because this is anything but political. This is a true crime thriller. It begins with the day of the assassination and then just tells you what happened over the next 90 days, and that's what attracted me to it.

"He already knew my rules. That I don't do anything political or religious. Nothing with those overtones... I was not going to attempt any real life politics because you don't know who can be offended," he said.

If he has to tackle anything political, then he will do it in the fictional space, Kukunoor added, giving the example of his JioHotstar show "City of Dreams".

"When I write something, I want to give equal weight to both parties. I don't mean parties in the political sense. I mean characters. And when you're doing anything political that usually doesn't find favour because someone always takes a side and the other side is going to be offended. So it's like 'Why wade into that?' Even in this, there is no taking sides of anyone. Nothing political happens. It's just the way the events unfolded and they're laid out." Kukunoor said he doesn't care to be in the public eye despite being a known figure in the world of movies.

"I don't have any presence on social media. Someone just told me that my last post was in June of 2019 when I wished Keerthy Suresh on her birthday apparently.

"I have a lot to say in the material that I write because it's the kind of person I am... I don't need to stand on a box and I don't need to spout things and wade into controversies and stuff like that. Not the kind of person I am. The ones who have the interest to do that, by all means they should." Kukunoor said he handled the story of "The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case" with utmost care.

"A lot of the special investigation team members are still alive today. So I want to make sure that I did right by them," he added.

Adapting a book is a very subjective yet cumbersome process, said the filmmaker, who collaborated with Rohit G Banawlikar and Sriram Rajan on the project.

"It's just subjective and me as a director, I have to just take a call on which incidents I feel can propel the story forward better because the book is always dense with details. You can't take every single one and turn it into a scene.

"And at the same time, sometimes you'll just take two lines of a book and you feel that that could give a huge, powerful scene." Asked what were his memories of the time when the incident took place, Kukunoor said he was in the US where he was studying for his master's degree in environmental engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.

"I had just finished getting my master's and obviously the event shocked me. I mean, he was charismatic and dynamic, so everyone knew of him, even in the West... but back in the day, you didn't have information come out every second. So usually living in the States, whatever happened in the investigation was encapsulated maybe in the world news section every week or something like that in the newspaper.

"So you remembered some broad things like the name was Sivarasan, who they were looking for. But the minutiae, I don't. For me, this was also a big relearning of such a large event in Indian history." "The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case", produced in collaboration with Applause Entertainment and Kukunoor Movies, features actors Amit Sial, Sahil Vaid, Bagavathi Perumal and Girish Sharma in the lead roles. PTI RB RB BK BK