Sep 20, 2026 4:30pm IST
Director Shakun Batra On Going With His Gut Over Data: ‘I Never Start Something That’s Driven By Box Office Numbers’ (EXCLUSIVE)
For Shakun Batra, filmmaking has never begun with box-office trends, market data or an attempt to figure out what is currently working. The director, who helmed the Ali Fazal-Radhikka Madan in the Netflix anthology “Lust Stories 3,” says his process starts much closer to home, with his instincts and, more importantly, with what excites him as a filmmaker.
“I think I have been fortunate enough to have started with my gut and not with data,” Batra says. “I am never starting with some box-office record or what’s getting made. That’s the last thing that comes to me. I always feel like what is it that I’m excited about."
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While his films can be offbeat, Batra says they are not necessarily far removed from the mainstream. Having grown up watching mainstream cinema, he continues to be drawn to characters and stories that can appeal to audiences while also offering actors something substantial to play.
“I still like to write characters that I think can be attractive for actors to play,” he says, adding that producer Karan Johar has been supportive of that approach. According to Batra, Johar has never discouraged him from pursuing a story simply because it may be unconventional, instead encouraging him to consider whether it can be made within a viable budget.
That balance between personal instinct and accessibility was also evident in the 2016 film “Kapoor & Sons.” Batra points out that while the film dealt with homosexuality and a character coming out of the closet, he never wanted that single issue to define the entire film.
“Even when I did ‘Kapoor & Sons’, it was a story about homosexuality, someone coming out of the closet, but it wasn’t just that,” he says. The film consequently incorporated elements such as music, songs and a love story, not as commercial ingredients imposed on the story, but as organic parts of the larger narrative. “There was music, there were songs, there was a love story, but it wasn’t like forced upon me,” Batra says.
For the filmmaker, however, there is one principle that goes beyond questions of genre, budget or commercial viability: understanding the characters. Batra believes writers and directors need to explore their characters deeply enough that their choices become comprehensible, even when those choices may be difficult to accept.
“Just understand your characters deeply and anything you are doing, you should not be doing it from a place of judging the character,” he says.
His reasoning is simple: “If you’re judging the character, that means you haven’t explored it enough.” Batra says the process therefore involves going deeper into the character’s motivations until the filmmaker can understand the decisions they make. “So then you keep trying to understand the character one step more, one step more till the time you’re like, Oh, I can now see this character enough to understand the decision-making,” he says.
When asked if there is one rule he would carry into every film, he strongly replies, “You do not ever judge your characters.”
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