The multi-talented Swanand Kirkire recently made his debut as a web series writer and creator in Amazon Prime Video’s Bandwaale. But that’s not all. He is also playing one of the leads along with Zahan Kapoor and Shalini Pandey.
In an exclusive chat with Bollywood Hungama, Swanand said that this is a rare OTT show without any adult content. “This is the kind of a show that can be seen with the whole family,” he said.
Sharing the storyline, he said that it’s about three people. “One is a girl who wishes to be a social media influencer, which is ghar ghar ki kahaani these days. She believes if she becomes one, she can become independent. In earlier days, when someone had to do something, they had to go out of the house and even out of the city. But you can be a social media influencer even while being inside your home. She is a poet. But she realizes that this is not easy. Then the two people who came into her life as problems, become collaborators with her. One is a brass band singer (Kirkire) and the other is a DJ (Kapoor). This is a humorous family show. There are no cuss words,” he said.
It is because of Kirkire’s association with singer Ankur Tewari that Bandwaale was born. “Both of us are from music background,” he said. “We were thinking that we should do something together. We wanted to write a musical film which had Indian music and also western influence. We then pitched the idea to Amazon Prime Video. They liked it and this is how it began.”
Kirkire had earlier worked with Zahan Kapoor in Makarand Deshpande’s play Pitaji Please. “While we were writing Bandwaale, we felt Zahan can play this character. In between, the good thing that happened was that his Black Warrant also released and he got an identity,” he said and added, “Shalini is fantastic. She looks beautiful and she has also done well. She has done a lot of work but she is still very sincere and honest actor.”
Kirkire felt the challenge of being a creator as well as one of the main actors. “The biggest challenge is that both shouldn’t get mixed. When you are acting, you will need to concentrate only on that. You can’t look at other things. To separate both was difficult. So, I decided to hand over a good amount of that responsibility to our director Akshat Verma,” he said.
Kirkire is a rare artiste who, at the start of his career, donned various hats in theatre. He then went onto become a lyricist, writer, singer, music composer and actor. When this was pointed out to him, he said, “I consider myself fortunate that I got to do a lot of things. It is like a blessing. I hadn’t thought of becoming a lyricist but I became one. I hadn’t thought of becoming a singer but I did that too. I hadn’t thought at all of being an actor but I have done so many films. People spend their life doing so much of work. I am very lucky that I got to do all these things.”
In between, Kirkire also wrote Hindi dubbing scripts for Tamil films. He shared that the task is much more than just translating lines from one language to the other. “The biggest challenge is to lip-sync,” he said. “So, you can’t translate it as per your wish. You have to do it within a space when the lips of the character moves. It should appear that the character has spoken in that language. Hence, you need to choose the right words that fit in. That was very challenging as Tamil and Hindi are very different from each other. The sensibilities in Tamil and Hindi are also different. It’s a tough job. I did this for a few films.”
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