If Ravi Chhabriya has turned director today with Diljit Dosanjh-starrer Detective Sherdil, he says it’s all thanks to Ali Abbas Zafar. The filmmaker, with whom he worked on Sultan (2016), pushed him to pursue direction. “When Ali was directing Jogi [2022], I was starting to write Detective Sherdil. After Jogi, we pitched the script to Diljit and he loved it. He hadn’t played a detective before,” says the debutant director.
For his first film, Chhabriya wanted to explore a genre that has fascinated him since childhood — mysteries. From there was born the script about a quirky detective, who has to crack the case of a multi-millionaire’s murder. “I grew up on Abbas-Mustan thrillers like Khiladi [1992] and Soldier [1998]. [Rajiv Rai’s] Gupt [1997] is one of my all-time favourites. That era gave us edge-of-the-seat storytelling, and I loved the tension around whodunits before social media spoiled everything. I wanted to recreate that dramatic thrill, but with a new lens. So, it’s a whodunit, but more importantly, it’s a howdunit,” he says of the Zee5 film that also stars Ratna Pathak Shah, Boman Irani, Sumeet Vyas, and Banita Sandhu.
Ravi Chhabriya
Considering he comes from Zafar’s school of cinema, one assumes he envisions movies on a big scale. Had he seen Detective Sherdil as a theatrical experience? “If the viewers we were targeting were going to the theatres, we would’ve gone there. But they’re on OTT. So, we followed the audience. For me, it doesn’t matter whether someone watches the film on a mobile phone or in a theatre. Plus, Zee5 has great reach in India and globally. Diljit’s fanbase is massive, so it made sense to go where they are.”
