EXCLUSIVE: Before narrating MAYA, Hugo Weaving almost starred in AMERICAN version of Tumbbad – Anand Gandhi, Zain Memon share FASCINATING trivia; also reveal, “With MAYA we’re building a universe with its own biology, economics, politics, long before writing a single "WOW’ scene"

After wowing audiences with Ship Of Theseus (2013) and Tumbbad (2018), Anand Gandhi is back with another stunning venture – MAYA. It is a new sci-fi fantasy Universe created by Anand Gandhi with designer Zain Memon, with the first product being a novel, MAYA: Seed Takes Root, which launched on Kickstarter and is narrated by Hugo Weaving. The universe is designed to be a multi-format, interconnected narrative that uses stories, games, films, and other experiences to explore themes of control, truth, and human potential in the 21st century. In an exclusive interview with Bollywood Hungama, Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon spoke about MAYA in detail.

 

EXCLUSIVE: Before narrating MAYA, Hugo Weaving almost starred in AMERICAN version of Tumbbad – Anand Gandhi, Zain Memon share FASCINATING trivia; also reveal, “With MAYA we’re building a universe with its own biology, economics, politics, long before writing a single "WOW’ scene"

 

MAYA is a very unique concept. What challenges did you both face not just in creating it but also ensuring it reaches the people correctly?

 

Anand Gandhi: The first challenge was the sheer scale. With MAYA, we aren’t making a single film or a single game. We’re building an internally coherent universe that will give rise to games, films, books, toys and themed experiences for at least a decade. That meant doing worldbuilding first at the level of evolutionary biology, architecture, economics, cognition and politics, long before we allowed ourselves to write our first “wow” scene. Holding that complexity in our heads and still telling an original, urgent and emotional story with very human, very identifiable characters has been the most exciting challenge of MAYA.

 

The second challenge was epistemic. MAYA deals very directly with questions of prediction, control and manufactured consent in the 21st century, and how systems shape what we desire and believe. We wanted to dramatize those ideas without reducing them to conspiracies or comforting simplifications. That required years of research, conversations with scientists and thinkers, and a lot of discipline in how we invent the systems in the world of MAYA, so that they reflect our real-world systems accurately and yet remain deeply engaging.

 

Zain Memon: Then there is the question of how it reaches people. A universe like this can easily be mis-positioned as “just another franchise”. We’ve tried to be very deliberate about avoiding that: starting with a beautifully produced novel, building a community through our Kickstarter, conventions, and festivals. We also want our readers, players and viewers to discover that this is not only a deeply thought-through world, but also a welcoming, expansive one. Our job is to make something rigorous enough for nerds like us, and clear and inviting enough for a 17-year-old who picks up the book or the game on a whim.

 

MAYA is described as a multi-format, interconnected universe spanning books, games, films and experiences. When you first started building this world, did you begin with a single story (like MAYA: Seed Takes Root) and expand outwards, or did you design the larger universe bible first and then insert individual narratives into it?

 

Anand Gandhi: In the very beginning, what we had were fundamental questions: What stories are most urgent to tell right now? What metaphors and allegories can translate the complex dynamics of our world into an epic, enthralling mythology? From there emerged the early “Bible” questions: What kinds of species live on this imagined planet? What do they stand in for in our real world? What kind of world would produce a system that can meaningfully predict the future?

 

Zain Memon: As that scaffolding became more detailed, Yachay’s story in Seed Takes Root emerged as a kind of “critical experiment” inside the system. Once we met him, and Hidamma and Kshar, the universe stopped being abstract and started arguing back with us. The Bible would suggest one thing; a character would stubbornly refuse to do it. The process has been iterative ever since: on one hand we have a living simulation of a world, and on the other, very human (and non-human) characters are constantly refining it.

 

Anand Gandhi: We didn’t write one neat bible first and then plug stories into it. We built a world robust enough to behave like a system, and then kept stress-testing it with stories.

 

At what stage did Hugo Weaving come on board? Did he immediately agree, or did you both have to convince him?

 

Zain Memon: The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings and V For Vendetta are still some of the most inspiring works of modern myth-making for us. They’ve quietly shaped our worldviews, our questions and our craft. What’s common to all three? Hugo Weaving, of course.

 

Anand Gandhi: Hugo has also been a dear friend for more than a decade. We met when we were both on the jury of the Sydney Film Festival in 2014, and he very generously came on board to present Ship Of Theseus for its Australian theatrical release.

 

Zain Memon: Later, when Anand was making Tumbbad, he was also exploring an American global version of the film. Hugo had agreed to play the English equivalent of the character called Raghav in that version, which was announced globally, but eventually not made.

 

Anand Gandhi: So, a true collaboration was long due. We shared the story of MAYA with him. He came down and spent a day with us in Goa, reading, talking, and probing the ideas. I’m deeply grateful that the world of MAYA resonated so strongly with him. It wasn’t about “convincing” him in the traditional sense. Once he recognized the ethical and philosophical questions at the heart of the project, the partnership felt very natural.

 

 

Your earlier works like Ship Of Theseus and Tumbbad questioned perception, morality and myth. How does MAYA extend or evolve the philosophical concerns you’ve explored before, especially around control, truth and human agency in the 21st century?

 

Anand Gandhi: In Ship Of Theseus, I was interested in perception, identity and ethics at the scale of individuals making difficult choices. Tumbbad explored greed and myth at the scale of a family and a village trapped inside a cursed economic story. With MAYA, the questions move to a civilizational scale.

 

Our choices are often not guided by the values we say we hold, but by the futures we can vividly imagine. If I can clearly picture a world where people who look like me, or think like me, deserve dominance over others, I’m more likely to make choices that move us towards that world. If I can just as clearly imagine a future in which every last being on the planet has access to wellness, dignity, knowledge and agency, without harming those I currently identify as “my people”, then I am more likely to fight for policies and actions that make that world possible.

 

Stories and myths are the most powerful tools we have to prototype those futures and then reverse-engineer the values we need to reach them. Democracy was once a story. So were money, nations, many of the ideologies and policies we live and die for. MAYA extends my earlier work by asking: in an age of predictive algorithms, data regimes and manufactured consent, who gets to tell the stories that shape our sense of the future? What does human agency look like when the game board itself is being constantly nudged?

 

For at least the next decade, my focus is to help create clear, credible, plausible, inspiring visions of our shared future, and to explore the values and policies we’ll need if we truly intend to get there.

 

Since MAYA spans games, films, books and immersive experiences, how do you practically collaborate as a director (Anand) and a systems/experience designer (Zain)?

 

Anand Gandhi: We think together at every level. In MAYA, passive and active modes of storytelling are both fundamental. Every chapter in the book can be translated into a film scene, and almost every scene has a game structure or a player experience embedded in it. That is by design.

 

Zain Memon: Cross-disciplinary systems thinking and transmedia expression are not afterthoughts for us; they are the DNA of MAYA. On a practical level, that means a lot of shared whiteboards, documents and arguments. When I propose a game mechanic, Anand will ask what it feels like emotionally for a character. When he suggests a story turn, I’ll ask what it does to the larger system economically, politically, or ecologically.

 

Anand Gandhi: Over the years, our understanding has become almost seamless. We’re fully aligned and deeply in sync. Very often, one of us will leave a room and the other will walk in, and within minutes, we’ve arrived at the same new idea from completely different angles! Our team often jokes that we must be rehearsing these moments in advance, but that’s just what happens when you share a world intensely for this long.

 

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