Murderbaad Director Arnab Chatterjee Talks About Production Roadblocks in Bengal

Writer-director-producer Arnab Chatterjee is all set for his debut Hindi feature, Murderbaad. After the theatrical release of the film, Chatterjee opened up about the difficulties he faced during the film’s first schedule in West Bengal.

The filmmaker said, “It was the very first schedule of the film, and we were a unit of nearly 180 travelling from Mumbai to Bagdogra (Siliguri). The local federation in Kolkata has a self-declared rule of a certain number of technicians which a producer has to hire during a shoot in Bengal. This rule becomes extremely unfair for producers with budget constraints, irrespective of Bengali or Hindi films. The whole Bangla film fraternity is suffering from this issue, since the business is already affected post-COVID. So you end up with your already signed-up crew from Mumbai, an additional crew from Kolkata whose services are redundant, and in addition to that, you have to bear travel, food and stay expenses for the whole schedule.”

He continued, “To go with this, there are several local line-production loopholes which are exercised to take advantage of producers. I realised this game on the second day of shoot and took an overnight call to cut short the schedule to 4 days from 7, which didn’t set right with the locals. This resulted in a 25-hour long shift without breaks, just so I could finish the pending scenes and leave for Mumbai with the unit immediately. To add to the harassment, my entire unit was locked up in several hotels we were lodged in, an instant demand to clear all payments, and there was no time given to tally expenses. More than 100 tickets in waste, several crew members in distress, including my senior DOP, Mr Binod Pradhan.”

Chatterjee explained that it got quite taxing to address all these production hassles on the spot and simultaneously direct the film. He said, “I’m glad we overcame this schedule and despite budgets shooting up to nearly double of what was on paper, we managed to resume shoot soon after returning from Bagdogra. While making an independent film, if the very first schedule jolts you financially, you wire yourself differently for the remaining shoot as producer-director. All of this is part of the learning process, and on hindsight, I wish all of them well who have unintentionally taught me the harder way.”