20 years of Ek Hasina Thi: How a crestfallen Sriram Raghavan was passed on the script by Ram Gopal Varma | Exclusive

Urmila Matondkar in a still from Ek Hasina Thi

It's 20 years of Ek Hasina Thi. And with Merry Christmas making waves, the perfect way to wrap the two-decade-long journey for Sriram Raghavan was with a conversation about where it all began for him.

So how did the film come to you?

I 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 didn't work out. It was a film on encounter cops and Ramu didn't 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, "See if you like it." 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 - "You have to do this."

I 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 there.

And 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 us.

How did the rats come into the picture?

The 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 didn't recce before shooting and when we realised we couldn't shoot with 100 people in a mine, it seemed logistically impossible. You'd need oxygen support and it was a large crew.

We 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 there's a shootout. I didn't want to copy it but it was a visual in my mind. So Ramu tells me, "Okay, 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 top." When Ramu said this, I couldn't stop laughing. I didn't expect it. It was a cheap thrill. But it worked.

How did you weave it in?

Then 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. It's her overcoming her own fears.

How were these rats cast?

That 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 us.

Tell us about the climax scene.

It's 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. "I hope we aren't accused of ill-treating them coz they really liked working with us."

Did you guys debate the gore?

The final scene was shot in a quarry in Kharghar, Navi Mumbai and in a studio in Mumbai's 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.