Paused work on two films for ‘The Family Man’, glad we took that detour: Raj & DK

Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK said they decided to take a leap of faith by venturing into the long format with ‘The Family Man’ and are now happy that the risk paid off in a big way.

Known for hits such as crime comedy ‘99’, ‘Shor in the City’ and ‘Go Goa Gone’, the filmmaker duo, collectively known to audiences as Raj & DK, were working on a film and prepping for another but decided to pause them for the ‘Prime Video’ series, which became a runaway hit on the platform after its premiere in 2019. The second season came out in 2021 and was also universally praised.

Looking back, the directors, who also wrote the horror-comedy hit ‘Stree’ in 2018, are happy that they took the risk.

“We had to pause on the film we were working on at that time and the next film and said we want to do long format. We wanted to do this story. We even had ‘Farzi’ at that time, but we chose this and said to ourselves, ‘We should go into this’. Not many filmmakers were venturing into long format. So, I’m really glad we took this detour into long format and it paid off so well. It became so loved and widely known. Even in interiors, people’s faces light up after so many years because of ‘The Family Man’. So, you know you’ve done something that you should be proud of. It gave us another dimension for the kind of stories we get to tell,” Nidimoru told PTI.

DK, who, along with his creative partner, went on to make OTT shows like ‘Farzi’, ‘Guns & Gulaabs’ and ‘Citadel: Honey Boney’, said it is always a challenge to surprise the audience and yet give them something familiar with the story.

“The challenge is to be able to surprise you as much as you were surprised in the first season, but also not lose the thing about the early seasons that you’ve watched. We want everybody to watch the third season. It has been a long wait. We want that wait to be worth it and if people watch it and they like it, that’s step number one. But what I really want is for them to say, ‘This is even better than season one and two’, then that would be like, ‘Wow’. So, hoping for the best,” DK said.

For the third chapter, one of the hurdles the creators faced was casting the antagonist and after an extensive search, they finally settled on ‘Pataal Lok’ star Jaideep Ahlawat for the role of Rukma. Nimrat Kaur, who is another new entrant to the show, is also stepping into the negative role, alongside Darshan Kumar, who returns as Major Sameer, a Pakistani ISI agent.