Nancy Biswas: I know, I like that. I want it to be so much fun and I want to build so much excitement.

Vineeta Chopra

Sonia Gandhi

Alok Jha

Vineeta Chopra: We don’t see much of women in the public domain — I mean, that’s always what has been there. I think men in the space is very rare. [So], I think of it as an opportunity to be in front of a male or a female audience and hear about something which I think they would really take a delight in. But in terms of a male audience, it’s certainly not a common thing, and that’s why in the movie, we had a female protagonist, [an Indian woman]. So, that’s a great way to go about it.

Alok Jha: We were not looking for a female lead, absolutely not. What we thought was that the story is very, very, very important, and if you were going to do such an important story, you had to take care of it. The cast, and the script, we thought was outstanding, so to do that, and do it in a way that the audience could understand it, make sense of it. So what we did with Alok was bring someone else, and that somebody is a woman.

Nancy Biswas: So [in the film] there’s a male and female protagonist? In the original, there were only two.

Vineeta Chopra: Yes, and Alok [did this] in a very, very good way, and then you have to bring another character. We looked at a book, the famous ‘One Hundred Stories,’ called ‘The Secret of Solomon, by the Englishman Richard Coe, and we thought we could do a really nice way to bring it into the film. We thought it would be as if someone were reading it for the first time. And then we had to find another actor who plays a woman in it. And so, we cast Sonia Gandhi, [who] plays a woman.

Alok Jha: Our casting director gave us a lot of pointers. She said, here’s a woman, read this book. And what was great, by the way, was she was going to read it twice. We also heard an actress play a woman in it and she was also great to work with.