Make It Indian, Then Make It Travel

By Pickle September 10, 2026

By Pickle News Network

As Toronto International Film Festival 2026 opens, Priyadarshan sends ‘Haiwaan’ into theaters — and makes the case for Indian films that stay Indian On September 11, one day after the Toronto International Film Festival opens its 51st edition, an Indian director with 98 films behind him will release his 99th in theaters across India and the world.
“Haiwaan,” Priyadarshan’s Hindi reworking of his own 2016 Malayalam thriller “Oppam,” arrives with Akshay Kumar as a cold-blooded killer, Saif Ali Khan as a blind caretaker trained in the Kerala martial art of kalaripayattu, and a cameo by Mohanlal, who played the lead in the original. Kajol, Bobby Deol, Boman Irani and Saiyami Kher fill out the cast of the KVN Productions–Thespian Films co-production.
Priyadarshan has spent 43 years doing what global buyers keep asking Indian cinema to do — travel without translation — and he is blunt about why the industry still fails.
“As far as Indian cinema is concerned, my only problem is that we are not selling our culture,” he said in an interview. “So-called big filmmakers, including corporates, want to do films which are a kind of cheap knockoffs of Hollywood.”
His benchmark is South Korea. “Korean cinema is actually forging linkages with global cinema, but they are not downplaying their culture in any of their films,” he said. “We should also stick to our culture and make commercial films so that our creative values give us a distinct identity in the world.”
That is the frame he brings to “Haiwaan,” which he insists is not a copy of “Oppam” but a relocation of it. When he remakes his own work, he said, he keeps only the essence and rebuilds the rest around a new setting — the way “Gardish,” conceived as a village story, ended up in Mumbai’s underbelly.
“It should look like a purely Indian film ,” he said. “It should convince a global audience that it could happen only in India.”
He is equally unsentimental about which canvas he is painting on. “Here I’m playing to the gallery,” he said of the film. “When I’m doing that , I have to think about what the people in the gallery want. This clarity is essential.”
The gallery has rewarded him. In April, his horror comedy “Bhooth Bangla,” also with Kumar, crossed 200 crore rupees worldwide. Haiwaan reunites Kumar with Saif Ali Khan, an actor with whom the Mumbai superstar formed a hit buddy-buddy screen pair in the 1990s, after a 18-year hiatus.
Comedy, the genre that made Priyadarshan a household name with “Hera Pheri” (which was also one of Kumar’s most successful forays into the genre) and “Malamaal Weekly,” is also whatthe successful director wants to escape .
“There is a huge scarcity of humour in the world today. You cannot see a good Hollywood comedy,” he said. “There is a thin line between humour and buffoonery. I play only with situations.” His method is to find the child inside an adult audience. “To make the audience laugh in today’s time is a very, very difficult thing to do.”
The prizes came from elsewhere. “Kanchivaram,” his 2008 Tamil film about a silk weaver, won the National Film Award for best feature; “Marakkar: Lion of the Arabian Sea” won the same honour a decade later. Kanchivaram had its world premiere at TIFF with the director in attendance 18 years ago.
None of all this was supposed to happen in Priyadarshan’s life. His father, a chief librarian who translated Russian plays, refused to let him study film in Pune, fearing the stigma would jeopardise his sister’s marriage. Across school and college, their conversations totalled “hardly three minutes,” Priyadarshan estimated. Then the first National Award came. “He actually hugged me, and he cried.”
As a young man interviewing a celebrated director, he suggested there comes a point in one’s career when one has to stop. “There is a saying: when your sur is still good, stop singing.” The man was furious.
Film No. 100, a thriller with Mohanlal — the actor from his 1983 debut — is now set for 2027. The script is currently undergoing rewrites.