In 2018, Saregama's movie production house released Noblemen (now streaming on Netflix)—a film on teenage bullying in a fancy boarding school in the hills, starring Kunal Kapoor and Soni Razdan, among others. During the shoot, says Vikram Mehra, managing director of Saregama India, all the actors and crew who travelled to Mussoorie in Uttarakhand stayed in dorms for the duration of the filming. No hotels or quaint little homestays, as one might imagine.
"In a tight production budget, spend money where it shows," says Mehra on the phone from Mumbai. As MD of one of the oldest and largest music labels in India, Mehra helped launch Saregama Carvaan in 2016, that beloved, best-selling music device loaded with songs seeped in nostalgia. Mehra knows that the music box pre-loaded with old Indian songs has never been more relevant, what with the world sealed and people shut indoors due to the pandemic. But he believes that the unique model of Saregama's film division—Yoodlee Films—is also most amenable for these constrained circumstances. It has the potential to redefine how films are planned, produced and budgeted at a time when big Bollywood studios are staring at a hard road to recovery in the coming years.
"From the start, we were clear we wanted to make films for a digital audience. Now is the best time for the company to grow," says Mehra, chugged with the release of two talked-about films on Netflix in the last one month, Axone and Chaman Bahaar.
Since its inception in 2017, Yoodlee Films has roped in new, independent filmmakers and licensed 10 films to Netflix and three to Hotstar as originals. "No studio in India has been able to produce 13 new films in less than three years and license each of them," says Mehra who has four releases lined up in the next couple of months in multiple streaming platforms, including a Marathi feature called Habbadi, set in a Kabbadi-crazy village of Kolhapur.
"Yoodlee is a writer's studio. The only person who gets an entry in the Saregama office as far as films are concerned is the writer with a script, " says Mehra, emphasising how content and storytelling are of prime importance to the fledgling film production company.
Mehra says calls are taken on new scripts in 90 days after evaluation by a core group of 17 script readers from diverse backgrounds. Films under the Yoodlee banner, he says, are ready in nine months. And 30 per cent of the profits are shared with the writers.
Yoodlee Films cannot exceed the two-hour mark and all of them are shot in real locations. No artificial sets will do. Actors in Yoodlee Films don't go back to a studio to dub their dialogues; they are live synced on location. The film crew, unless they are extremely senior artists, take the train to travel to location, and expect no five-star hotels or vanity vans.
“We want to put all our costs on the production side. From scriptwriter to cameramen to director of photography, everything is controlled by us. All the 13 films we have made so far, the money is given to Ernst & Young. They are our cost auditors. They sit on the set and they have a pre-approved day-by-day break-up of the shots. Our films are always under-budget and completed in time. There is no cost escalation," says Mehra.
Shooting of movies backed by Yoodlee Films have begun in COVID-compliant ways, including 30 per cent workforce on set at any given point, refining of pending scripts and back-to-back online auditions for actors, directors, and musicians, among others.
Yoodlee has produced critically acclaimed titles in the past, including Ajji, Brij Mohan Amar Rahe and Hamid which won two national awards. "We are lucky we are making films in the era of Netflix and Hotstar. They have extremely progressive people sitting out there who understand the problems of smaller studios," says Mehra, stressing why Saregama will not launch its own OTT platform. "We are IP owners. We don't own platforms. We give our music to everybody. Similar rule applies to our films. We want to be the rights owner. We will create quality content. We will retain the IP of that content and license it all streaming platforms. We are owners of 1,20,000 songs and 59 full movies. It is one of the largest IP libraries you will find in this country," he says.