It doesn’t happen every day that a project ticks every box. But IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack proved to be exactly that for Vijay Varma. The Netflix thriller, created by Anubhav Sinha, offers a retelling of the 1999 hijack of Indian Airlines Flight 814, which was carrying 173 passengers from Kathmandu to Delhi. To bring this chapter of Indian aviation alive, the creator-co-director roped in some of Hindi cinema’s finest actors, including Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Kumud Mishra, Manoj Pahwa and Dibyendu Bhattacharya. “Even if I tried, I didn’t have a reason to not do the show. The fact that I would get a chance to work with him and this royal rumble of a cast was tempting enough,” smiles Varma.    

That the subject is a part of India’s modern history became another motivation for Varma to say yes. “The script is a page turner. I knocked out 200 pages so quickly. It’s based on an incident that is modern history for us. It changed the way the aviation industry works.”