O My Beloved

O Meri Jaane Jaan was born from a high concept Idea of a girl entering into a film universe. While we seen this concept done before in Hollywood films such as "Purple Rose of Cairo" & "Last Action Hero", we have never seen it done in an Asian context. My producer decided to pitch this story with an Asian twist to it, adding Bollywood elements into the story. From then on, our goal was to make a colourful, entertaining, funny, all around masala entertainer for audiences to enjoy as well as learning lessons through humour.

This project shines a light on not just Bollywood films in general but also the Indian minority of Singapore, on how they are on the receiving end of racism through micro aggressive racist comments are made against them, and often words hurt more than actions. I hope the project sheds light on what is going on in Singaporean society, to bring to light that racism still exists in Singapore. Next, I also want to quell the stereotypes of Bollywood cinema, where they are often categorised as stupid entertainment, where they are actually more than just men and women dancing around a tree.

I feel that I bring a unique, quirky perspective to O Meri Jaane Jaan and that it helps to do a film from a fresh, different perspective as it is a difficult genre to tackle. The challenge of such a movie is what motivates me to make O Meri Jaane Jaan the best that it can be.

My cinematic influences have always been the Auteur Wes Anderson, Edgar Wright and Taika Waititi. All three of them have a very different sense of humour from one another and many shots as well as the humor in the film is inspired by them.

I even determined to make "O Meri Jaane Jaan" my own "Thor Ragnarok", a blockbuster with heart and humour at its core, where you can tell through and through it's Taika's work.

From Wes Anderson and Edgar Wright, I've learnt that the medium of film is not just also to use the actor's action on screen to tell the story or the dialogue, but also the usage of camera movements, aspect ratios and color play a huge part in film. Thus, our aspect ratios in the film are changing in between 16:9, 185:1 and 235:1 each showing the Television, Real and Bollywood world respectively. The usage of different colouring from the real world and the Bollywood world also helps differentiate their looks and aesthetics.

I hope the audience would be thoroughly entertained by the film, wether they laugh, cry, cheer or sing along with it, as the positive audience's reaction is what drives a filmmaker's passion to make films to feel emotion.