Lootere maker Jai Mehta is grateful for his learnings from his filmmaker father Hansal, but says his vision as a storyteller is distinct and driven by a project’s “style, music, and scale”
Vivek Gomber with Jai Mehta on the set
It may have been a month since the final episode of his latest work, the Disney Plus Hotstar action drama Lootere released, but Jai Mehta says words of appreciation continue to pour in. “I am humbled. It has been interesting to see the reaction because it wasn’t a conventional show. It does not [cater to] the target audience of the web platform. But the response has been reaffirming—the audience watches everything, and we can’t take them for granted,” he says.
Lootere, which chronicled the tale of the hijacking of an Indian ship by Somali pirates, marked Mehta’s independent feature debut after co-directing the 2020 Pratik Gandhi-starrer show, Scam 1992, with his filmmaker-father Hansal Mehta. For Mehta junior, the audience’s reception of Lootere was crucial, as he believes this project is a fitting reflection of his vision as a storyteller.
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Rajat Kapoor, who also features in the project. Pic/Instagram
“Scam was ultimately Hansal Mehta’s brainchild. I love Scam, but Lootere takes me closer to the filmmaker I want to be. I like to focus on the style, music and scale of a project. Although I have been part of production ventures that were [challenging to film], like Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur and Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh, Lootere was one of the toughest of them all.”
But Mehta isn’t one to rest on his laurels. “I am working on a lot of stuff,” he smiles, sharing that he is developing a period crime drama based on a true story for Abundantia Entertainment. “It has been co-written by Vishal Kapoor and me. Vishal also wrote Lootere, with me. I have been writing it for five years. It’s a homage to all the films that have made me the filmmaker I am today. It’s a hat tip to films like Memories of Murder, I Saw the Devil, select Ram Gopal Varma films, and all the movies that I have enjoyed in the crime drama space. This will be my love letter to them.”
Mehta plans to take the film—set in Bihar in the ’80s—on floors this year. “Visually, the film will look big, because I will shoot it with wide-angle lenses. It will be an emotional offering,” he signs off.
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