Netflix’s Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has told an audience of Indian filmmakers that they “ain’t seen nothing yet” in terms of the streamer’s ambitions in the country.
Sarandos was in Mumbai for a fireside conversation with celebrated Indian director Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who is making the sweeping new series Heeramandi for Netflix.
Sarandos said India is the fastest growing Netflix market in the world and the company will continue to bet big on originals from the country.
At a separate Economic Times event on Friday, Sarandos said India will get a bigger slice of Netflix’s $16.8B content budget. Netflix has made 100 originals in India, 28 of which were last year.
Heeramandi promises to a major milestone in Netflix’s plans for India. The eight-part series started shooting last June and will tell the stories of courtesans and the hidden cultural reality of Heeramandi, a dazzling district in pre-independent India.
Sonakshi Sinha, Manisha Koirala, Aditi Rao Hydari are among the cast of a story that will put women front and centre. “These were courtesans, who behind their veils they felt so much pain and yet they will come in the evening and sing and dance,” Bhansali said. “They pleased those men, they entertained those men and then they went back to their dark world.”
Bhansali, the director behind BAFTA-nominated Devdas and Gangubai Kathiawadi, which generated Oscar buzz last year, said Heeramandi was his most ambitious project to date.
“Shifting to digital, I’ve made it even bigger. Heeramandi is the biggest project that I’ve made, it’s so huge in scale,” Bhansali said. “I had to do something special … to make him [Sarandos] proud.”
Sarandos compared Bhansali to Baz Luhrmann and praised his attention to detail in investing “a lot in little movements of emotion.” He added: “This will thrill audiences in India and, for many people, it will be the first time they have seen anything like this in the world.”
Sarandos added that it was the “honour of a lifetime” to work with Bhansali.