A decade ago, zombies made their Hindi film debut and it all started with three men in a room in Mumbai’s Versova. Go Goa Gone, helmed by Raj and DK, was born when the duo, along with actor Kunal Kemmu, who starred in and penned the Hindi dialogues for the film, considered the idea of trying something weird – even if it meant that they were taking the risk of not having producers to back their vision.
“There were so many people who couldn’t even pronounce Zombie properly,” Kunal tells indianexpress.com on the film’s tenth anniversary. Co-starring Vir Das as Luv and Anand Tiwari as Bunny, Go Goa Gone followed the story of three Mumbai guys who, after a rave party in Goa, wake up surrounded by zombies. The film, which featured a hilarious guest appearance by Saif Ali Khan as Boris, a Russian mobster-turned-zombie hunter from Delhi, opened to good reviews and emerged a healthy success at the box office.
Over the years, however, the film gained wider attention and love, with younger audiences appreciating its loose, inventive humor. In an interview with indianexpress.com, Kunal Kemmu mentions how the project, which was originally a gangster crime comedy, turned into a hilarious zombie survival film because the weight of having a star like Saif in the film changed the perception. of at the box office. , the reason he hid his right hand in the first half, and the status of the film’s long-awaited sequel.
Edited excerpts:
How do you see 10 years of Go Goa Gone?
I can’t believe it’s been 10 years already. You feel blessed, especially with Go Goa Gone, because it started as these three people in a room where Raj DK and I wanted to do something so wild that we knew we wouldn’t have any takers. I come from that place to here! People forget movies, they come and go. But you rarely come across films where even after 10 years, people want to see another part, they talk about it, they have so much love for it, they talk about sequences and dialogues. For me, Andaz Apna Apna was that movie. I feel like in any small way, this could be my Andaz Apna Apna.
Over the years the film has had a cult following. I’m sure it’s incredible.
At the time, we were happy to have the opportunity to make a film like this and to have an audience that would enjoy and appreciate a film like this. Everything else has happened in the last 10 years. It has such a recall value. brings smiles to people’s faces.
Why do you think the film has managed to stay relevant even after a decade?
I have learned not to question things when things are going well. (Laughs). I do not have an answer! Now if you ask me why I think Andaz Apna Apna is relevant even after all these years, I would say I don’t know. I just like the humor. I can keep going back and watching it over and over again. It’s different for different people. For some, it may be the friendship between three boys, for some it may be the zombie comedy, where you are scared and laugh at the same time.
Take me back to that room where you and Raj and DK sat wanting to do something different. What is the origin story of Go Goa Gone?
I think the basic idea was that these boys are lazy they end up in this place and it was supposed to be a crime comedy and I remember we were talking about this idea for a couple of months. Raj and DK were in America and I was in Delhi. I got a call from Raj and he said, “Remember that idea we were talking about? I have another idea. Don’t react to it. I will tell you this idea. Don’t hang up. Digest it and then call me back. What if these guys go to Goa, get to this party, and instead of gangsters being menacing, they’re zombies and everyone’s getting stoned!
I said first of all tell me you’re not kidding me because I don’t want to think about it and then you’re like, “Haha, I was kidding.” I hung up and went over to Soha’s house and told her about the idea and she was the first person to say, “I think it would be amazing!” I picked up Raj after 15-20 minutes and said “let’s do it”. “I don’t know who will make this film. I don’t know who will fund it to write it. Maybe we should do it ourselves.’ It was like yeah yeah let’s write it ourselves. It’s funny that so many things we discussed during the process made it into the film as dialogue. As we had discussed that if we take this movie to somebody they’re going to be like,’India mei toh bhoot pret aatma hot hain, yeh zombie kahan se aayein?’ We put it on film! There were so many people who couldn’t pronounce zombie right and were like what the hell is that word.
What was it like writing a zombie comedy for the Hindi audience, which of course is not used to the genre, it has a very niche, urban appeal anyway. How do you make it accessible?
Between the three of us, we were completely in sync, passionate and completely instinctive that this is the film we want to make. That’s why Luv, Hardik and Bunny are having that conversation when they are walking, which was our conversation, that we have aatma and churails with crooked legs, but they (zombies) had straight legs and to reach the place where these three identify with the fact that these are zombies. This is what we tried to do, to bring it out in dialogues. In college I was reading a lot about globalization and so I was like let’s put this about globalization, that, “Pehle ye leke aaye HIV, ab leke aaye zombie.”
So the idea was to make it more relevant. It was just the three of us having fun and thinking, even if nobody makes it, at least we’ll have a script that we can read once in a while and have a good laugh. We were lucky enough that someone like Saif and his production house heard it. He was the first guy who read it and said, “Oh my God, this is hilarious, we have to make it.” We thought he was joking but he was serious. It was a risk, but he saw our vision and I’m glad it paid off really well for them too.
Why did you consider Saif for the part of Boris?
It was one of those dinner parties where he asked me what I was working on and I told him it was something about zombies and since he knows that genre, he wanted to know more. It was an informal conversation that led to an intrigue in him and when the script was ready, I sent it to him, he read it and he really liked it. For us, it was an obvious choice to play Boris because he’s not the ‘hero’, but it’s a really cool look. He immediately agreed.
Boris is such a cool character, a guy from Delhi with a Russian accent. Where did it come from?
My take on this is that we knew he was going to show up in the intermission, and I wanted to introduce him by saying “I kill dead,” because “I see dead” is such a famous line from The Sixth Sense. Go Goa Gone, not many know, had a very long journey not only from the time it was written to be made, but even its creation was spread over two years. We shot the Goa bit and then Saif’s dates were not available but we wanted him to play Boris. A year went by, I did another movie in between, I cut my hair, and then I was like, “Oh, now I have to wait for my hair to grow again.” That’s when the infamous hoodie – which was my personal hoodie – became Hardik’s look. It was done to hide my hair, which wasn’t as long as it was in the first half. So a lot of writing changed as well.
Earlier, Boris only had two scenes, but once we realized he was doing it, we wanted to give him a few more things, Boris started to develop from there. Not only that, another interesting fact about the film is that when I started the film, my right hand was in a cast. So if you see the opening scene when we’re on the couch, my right hand is under the pillow because I was hiding the cast! So in the first half, I basically do everything with my left hand – on the toilet, I smoke with my left hand and I’m right-handed! The sleeve was not folded, it was open so it could cover as much of the cast as possible, the rest was removed using VFX for the scene. That’s how we went for half the movie. The following year, when my hands had recovered, I became right-handed again, firing weapons from my right hand. So, I’m ambidextrous in film.
What happened after the movie came out, can you describe that weekend, that month for you?
It was bittersweet, because there is a different side to his job. We never had the idea that this would be the next blockbuster, it was supposed to be a low-budget film that would be experimental in some ways and find its audience. But Saif was in the film and promoted in a way where he was the centerpiece, and he had just come out of Cocktail. There was a perception that this is the next 100 Cr movie that is going to come and that weighed on the movie. It was never a pan-Indian film, the whole zombie idea is very metro. I made videos of multi-country home shows where people are laughing, having a great time, but at the same time, box office across India didn’t resonate with what the perceived image of the film had become.
The film was a profitable venture at the box office, making more than they had spent, but at some point there was a perception that this film should be the next Cocktail, which it wasn’t going to be. At that point, it became bittersweet for all of us because while we were happy that people were enjoying the film, the box office was not up to par. Personally I was happy, because this was not a cocktail, it was a film about three boys and Saif played Boris, it was not a “Saif Ali Khan-led film”. So if this miscommunication was created somewhere, we were not responsible for it. But over the years, the love, the adoration trumped everything – it didn’t matter what happened in the first weekend with the film.
How many times have people asked you about the sequel? And is there a legitimate update?
Every time I promote something, Go Goa Gone comes up! It’s a shame we didn’t make it. There is no legitimate update on this, but sometimes I also feel that it could be a blessing in disguise, because when a film has so much love and fans, it can be risky (to have a sequel). They will always be compared to the first and what if we are not able to live up to those expectations. Now even more; It would be different if in three years we had released a second part, but now it has become an urban legend because ten years have loved it! I’m not saying that’s why we haven’t made it, but the stars haven’t aligned on that yet.
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