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“It was a massive gamble,” says Gurmmeet Singh, director of Mirzapur: The Movie, and one of the creative architects of this world, alongside the show’s original creator and lead writer, Puneet Krishna. Singh is not wrong. There was a lot working against the idea of turning a smash-hit streaming series franchise (which has spanned three seasons so far) into a theatrical feature. There are the numerous storytelling challenges, for starters, of translating this world onto the big screen and “eventising” this saga without resorting to empty spectacle.
Throw in the fact that we know the events that precede and follow the film, and the ultimate fate of these characters. Mirzapur: The Movie takes place before the explosive Red Wedding-esque season one finale, so all the key characters are still alive and ticking. All this while trying to appeal to existing fans whilst also inviting new ones.
And yet, the pair have nailed it. For one, Mirzapur: The Movie has set the box office ablaze with the third biggest opening for a Hindi film this year, sailing past ₹100 crores domestic in four days according to industry tracker Sacnilk. It’s also a smashing time at the movies, capturing the essence of, and feeling honest to, these characters, whilst also re-presenting them with big-screen pizzazz, expanding this world and breathing freshness into the familiar.
It’s customary to open “post-mortem” interviews by asking the filmmakers what the few days since release have been like. In the case of Singh and Krishna, you don’t have to. We meet at the Excel Entertainment office less than 48 hours after the film’s release and the room is buzzing with both relief and excitement.
The two men are feverishly trading stories about the audience response to specific moments at different theatres they’ve visited. Before we can start our conversation, an actor from the film calls them to congratulate them and share in the celebration. Over a spoiler-filled conversation, the pair talk with a childlike excitement about a saga they clearly continue to derive joy from constructing.
Spoilers ahead for Mirzapur: The Movie and the series:
Walk us through the journey of the film. At what point during the making of the show did the idea for a theatrical movie first come up?
Gurmmeet Singh: When season one came out, we were fortunate enough that it was screened at MAMI; we got to watch the first two episodes on the big screen, and saw the audience going bananas. After that, the show came out and did so well, but that memory stayed in all our heads. And just before the second season came out, (producer) Ritesh Sidhwani kept saying, ‘Make a film, this world has film potential’.
Was he saying you should do a film instead of Season 3?
Singh: No, there were no caveats. We weren't thinking about how and what the story would be, etc. It was just that this could translate to a film. At that point, Puneet had partially moved away. Then, in 2024, he came back after making his Netflix show (Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper), with this particular idea for a film.
Over the years, we’ve had discussions about different ideas. At one point, there was a proper prequel version about these characters' lives before Season 1 starts. But then you’d only have one set of characters, not all of them together. And we weren't able to go beyond Season 3 because, again, we lost characters that we do want in it (Munna, Bablu). So, we couldn't do it as a ‘concluding’ film. That’s when Puneet came back and said, ‘Let's not think linear, but we'll go horizontal, and expand the world’. That’s where the spark came from.
Puneet, did you approach the writing differently, considering you’re now writing for the grammar of the big screen? Was it a different muscle?
Puneet Krishna: In the show, if I took four scenes to say something, for example, here we had to do it in one. We kept on saying that, ‘Remember, it's a big-screen experience. It has to look and feel different from the show’. Everything has to be a bigger canvas. Even Farhan (Akhtar) would keep saying, ‘We need to make it a bigger sweep’. That’s when the idea of Jaisalmer came in. That allowed us to make it visually different and go from small lanes and streets to the big, vast expanse of sand dunes to show a different world.
You’re reintroducing all these conflicts and equations for new audiences, but it rarely felt repetitive for existing fans.
Singh: We kept saying that we might know the show and the world, but we have to keep looking at it as if we are making it for the first time. For the newness, we had Babban (Ravi Kishan) who starts the story, but, structure-wise, when Bablu says that “We'll die if we keep doing this… Humein empire chalana nahi, banana hai,” that is actually your first conflict point. That's why it holds, because you feel that this is their (Guddu and Bablu’s) problem to deal with, and their nemesis is Munna. That rivalry is our film. Babban just becomes the catalyst for it.
Let’s talk about Babban. I liked that he wasn’t a generic, unpredictable gangster character, but was very calculating and smart. And you really feel his love for his girlfriend, Mumtaz (Sonal Chauhan).
Krishna: Many young girls have said that Babban is a very ‘green flag gangster’ (laughs). He’s so devoted that he even sews clothes for his Mumtaz. Forget being a gangster, how many men would do that?
It made the stakes of the climax fight very interesting. Usually the “loss of a loved one” is the hero’s motivation to go berserk. Here you gave that to the “villain”.
Krishna: We actually started getting scared that people will feel for him so much in that climax scene that they may stop rooting for Guddu, Bablu and Munna.
Singh: We even had to ‘water down’ her death. It was very emotional and was almost working against the film. We had to really amp up the Chandu Puncture (Satendra Soni) death and make that feel cruel to balance it out, because people fell in love with Ravi Kishan’s character.
But it was tough. The brutal thing was we knew a lot of the audience would know the story, and we had nobody to kill off in terms of our guys (Guddu, Bablu and Munna). So, just keeping that fight engaging was the biggest challenge that I faced. Also, whether that ‘Guddu getting-up’ moment would work, but it did, and the audience went mad.
There were two distinctly ‘Ravi Kishan moments’ that I’m certain were improvised by him. The first is when he shouts “Love you Mumtaz” after stabbing the guy in his introduction scene, and later when he starts massaging JP Yadav’s (Pramod Pathak) ears...
Krishna: Yeah, that “Love you Mumtaz” is not in the script. People are flipping out on it. (laughs)
Singh: The massage is what I came up with, but him going for the ears is all him.
What are the creative calculations that go into recasting a character like Bablu? Do you then tweak the writing to fit Jitendra Kumar?
Krishna: No. Zero tweaks. Guru Bhai really wanted him to play it as Jitendra Kumar coming in, rather than copying someone. Because the earlier actor (Vikrant Massey) was also so good, we didn’t want an imitation kind of thing.
Singh: Which is why we made him have a lot more desire. Earlier (in Season 1), Bablu had no desire. He was actually completely white. He was forced into this world. But he was never playing the game of chess. Here he is.
In Season 1, it was Guddu’s motivation that drove it. In the film, it’s Bablu’s motivation that’s driving it. Guddu has one focus: to get the watch back. Bablu wants to have a life and a world of his own, which will possibly be in the realm of Mirzapur, but with less violence.
Bablu’s manoeuvring for a better, safer life also feels a lot sadder because we know he’s going to die in two weeks after the events of the film.
Krishna: Yeah, literally two weeks maybe.
Singh: For the hardcore audience, we wanted them to feel that if Akhanda had given him Bahraich, he probably would never have died.
When Bablu engineers Guddu's arrest, is that out of concern or is it also out of convenience because he thinks Guddu will blow up the deal?
Krishna: It’s a 100 per cent out of concern. If it was convenience, he would have also engineered it so that Munna doesn't come along.
The most enjoyable decision you made was putting Guddu and Munna on the same side and forcing them to join hands in the desert. It brought in a fresh, fun dynamic between them.
Singh: That subversion is now what our world has become because we know where we can’t go (because of the existing story and future events), so within that we had to find new paths to explore.
In terms of those whistle-worthy moments, for most people, the big one is the JP Yadav-Munna scene. That’s the one where the audience loses it. Did you always know which scenes would get the biggest reactions?
Krishna: That scene we were confident about. Even Munna's introduction we were very confident about; the cake scene. Or Beena coming on to Munna and trying to have fun with this boy... we were sure that people would like that. It's not a whistle-worthy kind of a scene, but it hits you, and we were sure it would work. Beena is deliciously wicked, but at the same time she’s wicked for a reason. It’s a very strange thing because even if you know that she's going to do something really bad, you're somehow on her side. I wish I could have had 20 more scenes of her in the film.
Singh: I think the second half was a lot more unexplored territory for both of us. That's the ‘new film’ with the travel and the race. The first half is stuff that we’ve created already, so we were confident about that.
In my screening, Maqbool’s fight in the climax also got one of the biggest cheers.
Singh: We expected that. Maqbool is the strongest guy in this universe. While we needed Birju (Mohit Malik) to win that fight, the myth of Maqbool can't be destroyed, which is why the scorpion bite was required to give him a disadvantage. Otherwise, he would easily win.
One of the reasons to set this story in Season 1, as you’ve said, is to bring back a now-iconic character like Munna, who dies at the end of Season 2. I’m guessing there were a lot of people who said you shouldn’t have killed him off?
Singh: Yeah, there were many people who felt that was the wrong choice. But the discussions we used to have were that the story of each character lasts till they get what they want, in the show at least. The moment he gets what he wants, his story is finished. Munna got his father's love, he got the throne, his story was over.
Krishna: We actually wrote different versions of that scene, with different options of which character dies.
Singh: We went with this one because this was the only option in which Guddu and Golu’s arcs land. If we went with our other options, which we liked on paper, then the entire journey of the season wasn't paying off, and Guddu and Golu’s actions had no consequence.
Did you wish you did more with Golu (Shweta Tripathi) in the film? She’s the one character we know will go on to become a key central figure with a very exciting, transformative arc alongside Guddu.
Singh: So this is where our boxing of ‘this is a film’ came in. That is something where we had to make sure that we don't indulge too much because it wasn’t going to affect the main plot (of the film). We explored many options, but nothing that we felt we could do justice to. In our own way, we tried to bring that in with the fact that Bablu’s motivation to take a stand and step away from this world comes from Golu’s nudge when she says, “intelligent people can stop this violence”.
Do you have a favourite moment from the film?
Krishna: The post-credit scene of Beena, where she shoots him (Birju).It's very layered and extraordinarily melancholy. Beena is destroying this world because of the man she fell in love with, and now she’s in a position where she has to destroy that man. How can anything be sadder than that? She dies on the inside after that.
Singh: I would say the same scene also. That was one of the toughest things to do. Firstly, it’s arriving so late in the film, after we’ve finished the climax, so it has to work. And it has to have its own time, so you can’t rush it. Till we cracked that music, no one allowed us to keep that scene, and we would have had to drop it, which would break our hearts. We also wanted Akhanda to have a physical brawl in the film and be the ruthless man he can be, especially with Bauji (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) joining in to remind us all why we hate them.
Did you consider bringing back Bade and Chothe (Vijay Varma) for a cheeky cameo, like you did with Robin (Priyanshu Painyuli)?
Krishna: Yeah, we did. When they all stop at the dhaba in Jaisalmer, we considered making it a juice shop where Dadda Tyagi (Lilliput) would happen to be there because he was also travelling through Jaisalmer for some other deal for his booze business, and both the brothers (Bade and Chothe) would be sitting there with him. But that would have been too much and increased the length of the film without adding anything because, unlike with Robin, here with three characters you would need an entire scene.
We also thought of bringing back Amit Sial’s (police inspector) Maurya. That was another entire track we had, but it wasn’t adding anything extra to the layers and would’ve made things more complicated.
The film also has some of the most fun and creative violence we’ve seen o-screen in recent memory. Whether it’s Guddu and Bablu’s opening Bahraich shootout, or Babban’s car-stabbing scene or even Chandu Puncture’s introduction scene. Where do you come up with these creative ways to kill?
Singh: He has a folder (laughs).
Of different ways to kill people?
Krishna: No, different ways to kill people inside a house. Where you don't have access to a gun. We’ve had scissor situations and sugarcane juice machine situations. We’ve used chai, we’ve used forks. We had the idea of putting someone’s hand in a sewing machine during Season 1, but we couldn't shoot that, so we found a way to do it here.
What's next? Is it Season 4? Is it more “gap movies”?
Singh: I’ll answer this because I've rehearsed for this. The only thing that I can tell you is that Mirzapur will come back. In what shape and what form, that's for the powers that be to decide, including the fans and producers.
But what would excite both of you more to work on? A fourth season or a “mid-season 2” movie?
Krishna: I think both could be incredibly exciting. To say that the film would be more exciting than the show would be very wrong because the show has given us everything. But yeah, that's a possibility because having Munna on the big screen against Guddu... that whole equation between them would be fun!