Oct 23, 2026 7:00pm IST
‘Aamir Khan Got Me Onboard For ‘Prahaar’ After Watching ‘Paatal Lok”: Director Avinash Arun (EXCLUSIVE)
Avinash Arun says Aamir Khan brought him on board to direct “Prahaar”, the courtroom drama centred on public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam and the legal battle following the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. In an exclusive conversation with Variety India, Arun reveals that Khan had initially considered playing the character himself. Which is when he had approached Arun, having been impressed by his work on the web series “Paatal Lok”.
“Basically, I got a call from Aamir Khan for this one. At some point, he was interested in playing this character, but that didn't work out for some reasons,” Arun says. “But he got me on board because he had seen ‘Paatal Lok’ and felt I would be the right guy for it. So I'm really, really grateful to him for thinking of me in this way.”
“Prahaar: The Untold Story of Ujjwal Nikam” stars Rajkummar Rao as Nikam, alongside Wamiqa Gabbi, Jaideep Ahlawat, Sikandar Kher, Ashish Vidyarthi and others. Rather than construct a conventional anti-terrorism narrative around the 2008 attacks, the director wanted to examine the painstaking legal process that followed, using the courtroom as the dramatic centre of the film.
“Everyone already knows about the case, so I wanted to approach it more like a legal thriller rather than a standard anti-terrorist story,” he says. “It shouldn't be overly self-explanatory. It has to be told intelligently so that it generates curiosity and makes people want to learn about what actually happened.”
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For Arun, his conversations with Nikam, who led the prosecution in the case against Ajmal Kasab, helped him identify the emotional core of the story. “For me, this incident was about collective grief and common catharsis,” Avinash Arun says. “Exploring that radicalized mindset alongside the immense patience required by the legal process was the real backbone of the film.”
That balance between the scale of a historical event and the intimacy of human experience is also central to Arun's wider filmmaking philosophy. His work has moved from the coming-of-age drama “Killa” to the quiet emotional landscape of “Three of Us” and the crime thriller “Paatal Lok”. Yet the director believes that making films for theatrical audiences has become an increasingly difficult proposition, particularly when the material does not fit the template of a large-scale commercial entertainer.
“And then the story has to be a big, big one. The gamut of the story, the emotions it's dealing with, that has to be [big]. Otherwise, people are not turning up in theatres,” he says.
Avinash Arun believes the theatrical landscape has become especially challenging for thrillers and slice-of-life films, even as certain kinds of mass entertainers continue to draw audiences. For filmmakers working outside that space, the question is not just whether a story is worth telling, but whether it can persuade people to leave their homes and watch it in a cinema.
“The theatrical space is becoming much more difficult over time, over the period. Audiences don't want to come and watch those [thrillers or slice-of-life] films anymore,” he says. “Single screens are still working, and if you look at the films that are working with single-screen audiences, they're all masala films. So that's the struggle.”
For a director whose career spans independent cinema, streaming and theatrical releases, the commercial performance of one project has never been the only measure of what comes next. Arun points to the contrasting reception of his work as evidence of why he refuses to be confined to one genre or audience.
“From indie films to OTT, I have the best-reviewed and most-viewed show, and at the same time, there is a show like ‘School of Lies’, which I don't think many people have seen,” he says. “It's a varied body of work. I approach my work like that because it's not about one particular genre or one particular taste.”
The filmmaker refers to the different trajectories of his projects, from the acclaim surrounding “Paatal Lok” to the comparatively lower visibility of “School of Lies”. For Avinash Arun, that contrast is not necessarily a reason to retreat towards familiar territory. Instead, he sees creative repetition as a greater risk than trying something that may not find the same audience.
“I don't think I'm chasing success. I think I'm chasing failure in a way, because every time you've got to try something else. I get bored, you know,” he says. “When you try something new, that's the struggle.”
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