Tumbbad turns eight this week, and it’s back in the conversation after Alia Bhatt marked the anniversary. The cult horror arrived in 2018 as a monsoon-soaked, greed-driven story with very little dialogue. Here are eight things you may not have known about how it was made.
It started with a story that scared the writer
Rahi Anil Barve began with a story a friend told in the Nagzira wildlife sanctuary in 1993, which he said “made him crap his pants.” The story was “Aaji” by Marathi writer Narayan Dharap; Dharap, a translator of Stephen King and writer of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, had based “Aaji” on King’s short story “Gramma.” The film also partially derives from another Dharap short story, “Bali.”
Its title came from a Marathi novel
Barve said the title is derived from Shripad Narayan Pendse’s Marathi novel Tumbadche Khot. He wrote the first draft in 1997, when he was 18 years old. From 2009 to 2010, he created a 700-page storyboard within eight months, calling it the “anchor on which everything was based.”
It was on the floor three times and optioned by seven companies
The project had gone on the floor three times and was optioned by seven production companies who backed out. It first went into production in 2008 with Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the lead role, but was quickly shelved when the producer backed out. It was then shot in 2012 after Sohum Shah and Anand Gandhi came on board.
The film was rewritten and shot all over again
After editing, Barve and Shah realised the film was “not able to achieve what it set out to do.” It was re-written and re-shot, with filming completed in May 2015. Shah gained eight kilograms for the role and maintained his character’s look for the entire six-year production.
The sets were built around a real river in Pune
The Mutha River in the Onkareshwar area was taken as a reference for the set creation. In three weeks, the set of the small town around the temple was recreated, while a doppelganger set of an old Pune city was created for the film. It was shot in natural light, and some scenes were shot in Mahabaleshwar and the Tumbbad village.
They wanted the audience to feel drenched
Pankaj Kumar, the director of photography, wanted the film shot only during the monsoon with constant rain. Because of a shortage of rainfall that year, the crew used artificial rain and waited for hours for cloud cover. Kumar said, “We wanted the audience to feel drenched when they came out of the theatres.”
The score began with a Bulgarian choir
Prasad was sampling music from several composers when he heard the soundtrack “Apocalypse” from the 2006 video game Hitman: Blood Money, composed by Jesper Kyd, and decided to work with him. Kyd recorded the choir with Bulgarian music called “Descending,” the first track he wrote for the film. The title track was composed, arranged and produced by Ajay–Atul, with lyrics by Raj Shekhar; the album consists of 22 tracks and was released on 9 November 2018.
It made history at Venice before its India release
Tumbbad premiered in the critics’ week section of the 75th Venice International Film Festival, becoming the first Indian film to be screened there. It released in India on 12 October 2018 on 575 screens. Barve said the story’s main theme was greed, and the film’s three chapters were a metaphor for the “journey of India, as we see it today.”
Which of these Tumbbad facts surprised you most?
Facts from Wikipedia: Tumbbad, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Film images from TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.