The sprawling den of Anil Kapoor’s Shelly Rungta in The Night Manager, the underground castles, soaked in red, in vampire love story Toothpari, and the tiny, cramped apartment of Srikant Tiwari in The Family Man, making more room for drama than the people inhabiting it. All of them are settings familiar to the audience, but the man, whose imaginations are the source of these spaces, is probably not. “When I tell a layman I am a production designer, he asks me, ‘So, you do production?’ I tell him I design sets, so he says, ‘But that is done by the art director’,” laughs Saini S Johray, leading production designer in the Hindi film industry.

Enjoying a 13-year-long career that began with Yash Raj Film’s television show, Powder, in 2010, Johray is currently working on at least three projects simultaneously and has a few coming up, including the second part of The Night Manager, Amazon Prime Video period drama Gulkanda Tales, and Abhishek Kapoor’s next feature film. In an interaction with mid-day, the production designer opens up about his journey from Delhi to Mumbai, from designing weddings to building the world of popular series, and from being a fine arts student to now filmmakers’ right hand.