20 years of Ek Hasina Thi: Sriram Raghavan on how the rats came into the picture

Itrsquos 20 years of Ek Hasina Thi And with Merry Christmas making waves the perfect way to wrap the twodecadelong journey for Sriram Raghavan was with a conversation about where it all began for himSo how did the film come to youI was not the first writer on the film It was written by Pooja Ladha Surti She was working with Ram Gopal Varma He wanted her to write something about a female hero So that was the brief with which it was written She thought Ramu was going to direct it Around the same time I was going to direct something for him which didnrsquot work out It was a film on encounter cops and Ramu didnrsquot think it was the right time to make that film It later on became Ab Tak Chhappan He saw my face crestfallen on the brink of an outburst He passed me this script and said ldquoSee if you like itrdquo It had been 12 years since I passed out of FTII Pune and I had not made a single film till that point I took the script and sat in an auto and told myself ldquoYou have to do thisrdquoI went home that day and read it without a pause Everything about the story worked for me It simply drew me in The jail as a setting the lurid elements I love in a film it was all thereAnd then I met Pooja We have worked together ever since Pooja wrote the draft I read like a novella It took us two months to perfect the script The rats had not come in yet Ramu was mentoring usHow did the rats come into the pictureThe original climax was how she takes him to an abandoned mine where her father used to work The idea was for her to trap him there since she is familiar with nooks and crannies and let him die We didnrsquot recce before shooting and when we realised we couldnt shoot with 100 people in a mine it seemed logistically impossible Yoursquod need oxygen support and it was a large crewWe needed an alternate idea I told Ramu that the film is a thriller but somehow seems like a romance I needed something creepy There is a scene in Godfather 3 where a couple are together and she gets out of the room to get water and sees two gunmen She screams and therersquos a shootout I didnrsquot want to copy it but it was a visual in my mind So Ramu tells me ldquoOkay they are making out She does go to get water And screams Because there is a rat in her kitchen This guy pulls out his gun and goes running He finds her on the kitchen toprdquo When Ramu said this I couldnrsquot stop laughing I didnrsquot expect it It was a cheap thrill But it workedHow did you weave it inThen the story starts We see on TV that the man she had met is killed She buys a mousetrap and is scared to install it is struggling with testing it The mouse became a character Then once she goes to jail there is a scary scene where something is moving under her sheets My favourite is the interval scene where she smashes a rat Itrsquos her overcoming her own fearsHow were these rats castThat was a process We got some large wild rats and mixed them with white mice on whom we had to put some black colour The wild rats were hard to work with They could intimidate us Someone supplied them to usTell us about the climax sceneItrsquos so illogical They are in Delhi she takes him to some place in the hills There is a cave there But emotionally the scene worked I got a phone call from my sister in Delhi She loved the film and realised Maneka Gandhi was in the same theatre as her ldquoI hope we arenrsquot accused of illtreating them coz they really liked working with usrdquoDid you guys debate the goreThe final scene was shot in a quarry in Kharghar Navi Mumbai and in a studio in Mumbais Chandivali We debated over how much to show eventually leaving it to the audience to imagine his death as the light goes out and he screams as the rats attack