Kunal Kemmu on 10 years of Go Goa Gone: The film’s bittersweet release given Saif Ali Khan’s cameo, no sequel may be ‘blessing in disguise’

What was it like to write a zombie comedy for the Hindi audience, which of course isn’t used to the genre, it has a very niche, urban appeal anyway. How do you make it accessible?

Between all three of us, we were completely in sync, passionate and totally instinctive that this is the film we want to make. That’s why Luv, Hardik and Bunny have that conversation when they are walking, which was our discussion, that we have aatma and churails with twisted feet, but they (zombies) had straight feet and to reach the place where these three identify with the fact that these are zombies. That’s what we tried to do, bring it out in dialogues. In college I was reading a lot about globalisation and so I was like let’s put this on globalisation, that, ‘Pehle ye leke aaye HIV, ab leke aaye zombie.’

So, the idea was to make it more relatable. It was just the three of us having fun and thinking, even if no one makes it, at least we will have a script that we can read once in a while and have a good laugh. We were lucky enough that someone like Saif and his production house heard it. He was the first guy who read it and said, ‘Oh my God this is hilarious, we need to make it.’ We thought he was joking but he was serious. It was a risk but he saw our vision and I am happy it paid off really well for them also.

Why did you think of Saif for the part of Boris?

It was one of those passing things over dinner where he asked me what was I working on and I told him it’s something about zombies and because he knows that genre, he wanted to know more. It was an informal conversation which led to an intrigue in him and when the script was ready, I sent it to him, he read it and really liked it. For us, it was an obvious choice that he play Boris because he isn’t the ‘hero’ but it is a really cool cameo. He immediately agreed.

Boris is such a cool character, a Delhi man with a Russian accent. Where did he come from?

My contribution to that is, we knew he would be introduced at the interval point and I wanted to introduce him by saying, ‘I kill dead people’, because ‘I see dead people’ is such a famous line from Sixth Sense. Go Goa Gone, not many people know, has had a very long journey not just from the time it got written to be made but even its making was spread out over two years. We shot the Goa bit and then Saif’s dates weren’t available, but we still wanted him to play Boris. A year went by, I did another film in between, cut my hair and then I was like, ‘Oh now I have to wait again to grow my hair.’ That’s when the infamous beanie–which was my personal beanie–became the look of Hardik. It was done to hide my hair, which wasn’t as long as it was in the first half. So a lot of writing also underwent change.

Earlier, Boris had only two scenes, but once we knew he is doing it, we wanted to give him some more stuff, that’s where Boris started developing. Not just that, another interesting trivia about the film is that when I started the film, my right hand was in a cast. So if you see the opening scene when we are on the couch, my right hand is under the cushion, because I was hiding my cast! So in the first half, I am practically doing everything with my left hand– in the loo, I am smoking with my left hand, and I am a right-handed guy! The sleeve was not folded, it was open so that it could cover as much of the cast as possible, the rest was removed using VFX for the scene. That’s how we went about for half of the film. By the next year, when my hands had become fine, I again became a right-handed man, firing guns from my right hand. So, I am ambidextrous in the film.

What happened after the film released, can you describe me that weekend, that month for you guys?

It was bittersweet, because there is a different side to the business of it. We never had the notion that this is going to be the next blockbuster, it was supposed to be a small budget film that would be experimental in a way and would find its audience. But Saif was in the film and it got promoted in a way where he was the center piece, and he had just come out of Cocktail. The perception became that this the next Rs 100 cr film which is going to come and that burdened the film. It was never a pan-India film, the whole idea of zombie is very metro centric. I was getting videos of houseful shows in multiplexes where people are laughing, having a great time but at the same time, the box-office all over India wasn’t resonating with what the perceived image of the film had become.

The film was a profitable venture at the box office, it did more than what they had spent, but at some point the perception had become that this film should become the next Cocktail, which it wouldn’t. At that point, it became bittersweet for all of us because while we were happy that people were enjoying the film, the box office wasn’t according to what the perception had become. I personally was happy, because this was not a Cocktail, it was a film about three boys and Saif was playing Boris, it wasn’t a ‘Saif Ali Khan driven film’. So if that miscommunication was created somewhere, we were not responsible for that. But over the years, the love, the cult following surpassed everything– it didn’t matter what happened on the first weekend with the film.

Every time I am promoting something, Go Goa Gone comes up! It sucks that we have not been able to make it. There is no legit update on this but sometimes I also feel that it could be a blessing in disguise, because when a film has so much love and fan following, it might be risky to (have a sequel). They will always compare to the first one and what if we are not able to live up to those expectations. Now even more so; it is a different thing if in three years we had come out with a second part but now it has become an urban legend because they have loved it for ten years! I am not saying that’s the reason why we haven’t made it, but stars haven’t aligned on it yet.