Focused more on sensitive topics around partition, says producer Nikkhil Advani

CHENNAI: There is hardly a day left for Freedom At Midnight to have its OTT premiere and Nikkhil is calm and composed as he is assured that he has created something special for the audience and whatever we have seen so far stands proof to it. However, he asks for our verdict too and says, “It’s a good thing that you want to see more of the show. That is the feeling I had when I read the book as a young boy. I didn’t want to keep the book down as the characters were gripping and the characters I read flashed in front of my eyes.”

The first question Nikkhil asked the Sony team when he was approached to convert the book into a series was, “Do we have the rights?” is what I asked. When they responded in the affirmative, I started thinking about how I keep the audience intrigued. The book is so evocative and visceral that it helped us to start on the right note,” he remarks.

To present the topic of independence and partition on screen, is a touchy one and there is going to be a lot of talks about it post release and Nikkhil agrees. “I focused more on the sensitive part of the story which was told to me by my grandmother. The pain, the tragedy and the anger that were prevalent at the time of partition, and more than anything else people will have a passing opinion, especially today in the world of social media. I had to stick to the facts strongly about incidents that took place on August 16, 1946 and January 30, 1948 were indisputable. It is easy for people of today to say how decisions could have been made in the 1940s. So, I have made a show that will put the audience into the character’s shoes and watch the show from their point of view,” he says with a smile.

The cast selection has already been receiving a lot of appreciation and is another reason why Freedom At Midnight is the most-anticipated show in India now. Sidhanth Gupta as Jawaharlal Nehru, Chirag Vohra as Mahatma Gandhi, and Arif Zakaria as Mohammad Ali Jinnah impressed the audience when the trailer was launched. “For any other show or a feature film, a director sits with his assistants and casting directors or even the producers and we explore options in terms of cast that are available and actors who are unavailable on given dates. In this case, we also had to involve Jagdish Yere, who is in charge of the hair make-up and prosthetic expert. It is easy for me to say that I want Chirag as Mahatma Gandhi but the onus is on Jagdish to make him come closer to looking like Mahatma. We cannot match their looks 100 per cent because they are not great men only because of their physicality. Their aura and the life that they lived too matters as much as their appearances. Also, Sidhanth, Arif and Chirag are good actors too. Arif looks gaunt and has the stature of what I imagined Jinnah had. Chirag for me was an immediate choice for Mahatma Gandhi. I was convinced as soon as he walked into the room. I wanted to cast an actor from Gujarat because he has to break into Gujarati during intense dialogues. That is how we went about it,” elaborates Nikkhil.