Akshat Verma’s journey with his talented Kaalakaandi ensemble

Akshat Verma who will debut as a director with KaalaKaandi had an interesting and challenging experience working with a very talented ensemble. Kaalakaandi is a dark comedy based on three different stories in Mumbai where fate intertwines and destinies bump into each other. Kaalakaandi (a Marathi slang term for when things go disastrously wrong) is a story about life, death and karma!

With such an intriguing storyline, the director bought on board an eclectic starcast which includes Saif Ali Khan, Deepak Dobriyal, Vijay Raaz, Sobhita Dhulipala, Kunaal Roy Kapur, Akshay Oberoi, Shehnaz Treasury, Shivam Patil, Amyra Dastur, and Neil Bhoopalam.

Akshat Shares, “The challenge with an ensemble cast starts with the writing, where you’re juggling many more characters and trying to make them distinct and three dimensional. So for example, when you’re writing comedy, how do you give each character a distinct flavor instead of making them all sound the same.

And then to translate them to the screen, it was challenging and interesting because we were kind of making three movies in one. The demands of each story were different. So although your technical crew is the same, you’re dealing with different actors and every actor brings their own pace and rhythm in terms of their working style. Some actors hit the ground running and by the fourth or the fifth take they burn out and the others take two or three to warm up and get better and better the more takes you shoot. When you throw actors with different working styles together the challenge is to get the best performances from all of them keeping in mind that they all prime differently.”