Will AI Liberate or Colonise Storytelling?
Insights on the next era of storytelling with Ram Madhvani and Vikram Malhotra
In this episode of The Media Room, host Vanita Kohli-Khandekar sits down with filmmaker Ram Madhvani (Neerja, Aarya, Equinox Virtual) and producer Vikram Malhotra (Abundantia Entertainment – Airlift, Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, Shakuntala Devi; aiON AI studio) to explore how artificial intelligence, VR and data are reshaping Indian cinema and the business of content. From Ram’s vision of “making your temple the theatre” through immersive VR films at destinations like Tirupati, Shirdi and Ajanta–Ellora, to Vikram’s bet on aiON as a human-first, AI-empowered creative studio that could cut production budgets by up to 50–90% and shrink timelines to a fraction, the conversation dives deep into what the next era of storytelling might look like.They debate whether technology truly “liberates art” or risks locking creators into algorithm-driven templates and data-led handcuffs, raising tough questions around originality, copyright, valuation and “data colonisation” in a world where most AI systems are trained on Western content. At the same time, they discuss how AI can democratise access to tools, enable culturally rooted stories like a contemporary Jai Santoshi Mata, and open up new possibilities in genres like horror, while still keeping the human voice at the centre. If you’re a creator, filmmaker, media professional or simply curious about where cinema and content are headed, this episode is a sharp, honest look at the promise and perils of AI in storytelling—and why, even in an attention-fragmented world of reels and algorithms, the stories we choose to tell still matter.
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TRANSCRIPT
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar (Host): Hello and welcome to The Media Room. There's a new creature in the world of media and entertainment, artificial intelligence or AI. Huge amounts of work is happening across the world in AI and India, whether it's news broadcasting, publishing, I mean a lot of the work that I have seen in streaming, TV, on process flows, a whole lot of work using AI in these businesses happening.
But I was more interested in what's happening in the area of films and a couple of companies or firms which have announced, made announcements about AI. One was Abundantia, which is founded and is headed by Vikram Malhotra, who is former CEO of Viacom Motion Pictures. They've just announced a division called AION and there's Ram Madhwani who's doing, who's a filmmaker best known for Neelja and the streaming hit Arya.
He's doing a whole lot of series of short films with using virtual reality and AI. I sat down with both of them not to understand what it is that they are doing but to understand how AI could be a tool that aids filmmaking, what could it do to the business. So we just, we just tried to figure out what it is that AI could be doing in the business of filmmaking.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Hi Vikram. Hi Ram. Lovely to have you guys on the Media Room.
The reason I wanted both of you together and I was telling this to the coms teams is because both of you are doing not similar stuff but things around AI. It's a topic which fascinates me because I think there's a lot of talk, some of it is pure hype, a lot of valuation which is being driven by AI. So I just wanted to understand from both the filmmakers perspective, from the production team perspective, what is the picture of the producers and you are also a producer Ram, I know that.
But I'm thinking of you more as a filmmaker. Where AI fits in this picture for you? So first Ram, you want to take us through, you know you were doing this virtual reality shots at destination, you know whether it's a Taj or Ajanta Ellora kind of places.
Where is that particular venture at? Could you just take my listeners through that?
Ram Madhvani: As a filmmaker, you're constantly worried that your career will get over on a Friday and that they will put you in Siberia and they will not give you work ever. So I said how am I going to have a sustainable model? So I said while obviously the series and the advertising and the feature film continues, I would make something else where if earlier your theatre was your temple, I'm now going to make your temple your theatre.
And so when you get to let's say a temple or a destination like Ajanta Ellora, I will give you five minute short films because I just want to make films. Okay so wherever, so I'm creating my own distribution chain which basically two films a month, customised to that particular place. So if you go to Tirupati, then it'll be on Tirupati.
If you go to Shirdi Ke Sai Baba, it'll be on that. If you go to Ajanta Ellora, it'll be on that. So this was the plan so I could continue doing what I love doing and not be dependent on the validation and the sustainability and the Friday Mafia.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Friday Mafia is also the audience if I may point out but nevertheless.
Ram Madhvani: It's not the critics actually, it is the audience. You're right because it is that day that is when your career is decided and I just feel that it cannot be that my career, the anxiety is in being able to do for all of us. The anxiety is in being able to do what we were born to do.
How do we make a sustainable model?
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: So this is VR sets which you rent out at specific destinations for five minutes and has anything been built around it? Has anything got rolled out?
Ram Madhvani: So we have financial interest currently. The problem with VR is it's suffering from shelving but as you have seen the immersive experience.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: It was fantastic by the way.
Ram Madhvani: I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of Divinity. It goes better with the temple thought.
Exactly, I know. No, Cecil B. DeMille because of Ten Commandments and you know what he did with all those movies and right now I'm just frustrated that nobody is actually using VR and also what we have done is using AI since that is what the subject is about today and I'm hoping that I've already given you some bites which you can use in your edit.
Have I been short enough and is your editor going to be happy?
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: This is the filmmaker's people. Vikram, you have to tell me about Aeon. I know that I mean like Ram is famous for Neerja, he's done Arya, Neerja, various pieces of amazing work and several others but what is it with Aeon?
Why at this stage and what is the point? What are you?
Vikram Malhotra: One of the key building blocks of Abundantia from day one has been our ability to focus on the consumer. In an industry which is historically under-researched, under-analysed, deals with a fickle audience on the other side of the screen, our attempt has been how do we read the signs both for stated and latent demand. Okay.
That led us to do work like Airlift, Toilet Ek Prem Katha, Shakuntala Devi, Jalsa, Sherni, which was at a time when the mainstream was something else. My experience of running Viacom 18 motion pictures also taught me that there's a market large enough beyond the audience that you currently see, beyond what was being defined as the lowest common denominator. And my constant battle has been with the lens that we put as manufacturers on the audience.
It's almost like what we feel like making is what the audience must feel like watching. Having countered that in some manner and having built a few films with some amazing creators successfully, we started looking around the corner and that's how our entry into streaming happened. We were one of the first to kick off with Breathe in which started production in 2017, came out as one of the earliest shows in 2018 and then we've produced films and series in various models for the streaming companies.
Coming from the same philosophy, we said what's next. I've been a big believer that businesses get disrupted irreversibly by technology and that's exactly what we saw as the potential in AI. We tend to put a lens obviously for our industry as filmmakers, as producers, as creators but this is a mankind changing technology at play.
While our focus is on how can it tell stories better, how can we be more cost efficient, AI is developing viruses that have the potential to kill superbug bacteria. I mean there are helplines that are diverting people, avoiding suicides and pointing them in the right direction. That's the mankind defining work that these machines are doing.
So my theory was how far can it be when it starts impacting our business. Aon was born with the thought of our commitment to the future of storytelling. How does it act like an enabler, a liberator to beat the constraints?
Like Ram mentioned.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Give me an example.
Vikram Malhotra: I'll give you an example. To create a story like Hanuman for a company our size would have been impossible. It would have needed hundreds of crores of investment.
It would have needed six years, five or six years or more to develop research and do that. We can now put a filmmaker who understands creating and technology in the heart of it, leverage his voice and give him the tools and the ability to just go out there and create in a much smaller budget in a much shorter time.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: How much more? Can you give me some?
Vikram Malhotra: Absolutely. On an average my target at Aon is to reduce production budgets by 50 to 90 percent on a like-to-like basis and timelines by as much as one-fifth of a normal feature film and that's possible. It's democratised storytelling.
We need to look beyond the constraints.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Are you looking at procedural? I mean and this is the question I would ask both of you. Are you looking at processes getting streamlined?
So you know I did a lot of work on AI in filmmaking earlier last year but are you looking at processes getting streamlined? Are you looking at it getting into the you know from writing to think so you know what Ram was saying it's getting sentient.
Ram Madhvani: It's becoming sentient. And you become sentient before we become sentient. We become sentient.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: I always say it's like entering the world of Matrix which I'm doing 25 years after the film released but no.
Vikram Malhotra: The world of Matrix is now five years older than where we are today with the way the world is. I think it's encompassing. I think it's across the value chain.
It is already impacting from scratch to screen everything. I mean look at the vision that a progressive filmmaker like Ram has with what he's doing with what he just spoke about. In my opinion this starts with unleashing imagination.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: No but you mentioned that it will bring 35 percent of the firm's revenue.
Vikram Malhotra: In the next three to four years I anticipate almost 30 to 40 percent of our revenue coming from work that we do in and around AI.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Means these pieces of work will earn that kind of revenues.
Vikram Malhotra: Yes which means work fully generated in AI, work driven by AI that is live action plus AI, animation plus AI. We see the contribution of Aon as a creative division influencing our work to a percentage as high as that.
Ram Madhvani: Okay. Okay. Yes I wanted to ask you Ram.
Two or three things. One I think first I think that's an incredible track record that Abundantia has. I pronounced that correctly.
But it's an amazing track record. Two I think what Vikram is saying is about backcasting because a lot of the time what we do is we forecast this is what the audience will like and I think this is one of the rare people out there who's actually talking about before you make it, we're taking passion and talent for granted. We're taking your ability to tell a story for granted.
What we're really asking is what does the audience want. That backcasting I think is really important. Three and then I'll stop my…
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: No, no, no please.
Ram Madhvani: The root word of technology comes from technique and technique means art. It's a Greek word and therefore it's art, logy is language and so therefore any technology whether it was colour, sound, cinema, verite because of fast lenses, it was because people embrace technology. What we're doing right now is we're embracing the liberation of art.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: You mentioned this once before to me that technology liberates art.
Ram Madhvani: Yeah.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: I wonder you know and this was part of my later questions but I'm going to ask first because we're talking about this. How much of it is about liberation and how much of it is about it's that if it gets into the creation process is there some conflict here and also it's understanding not conflict not in a bad sense. What I mean is I'm you know the the reason I write a piece or I make a film is because I think I have a story inside of me and maybe sentient AI may have a story inside of it and that story is born out of years of training on stuff which humans have created.
Ram Madhvani: Yeah.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: So that to my mind is a conflict. You've trained it on something we've created and now you're asking it to create. So it cannot be original by definition.
Ram Madhvani: Can I be a little about my answer? You never are. Okay.
The data that is fed into you in your past life if you are believe if you're a believer in Hindu philosophy is the data of what you have become your prakriti of who you are today is based on the data that was fed into you. So are you limited by the data that was fed into you or is there something over here that is allowing you to go beyond the data to the definition of an idea is when two old elements come together to make a new element as E.M. Foster said only connect. That means the more data you have the more the synapses of your own neurones are going to connect and therefore make a new idea.
Therefore are we limited by our the things that have been fed into us by our education our parents and therefore is AI limited by the data that was fed into it or if is it at some point that the synapses of all of this together which is fed into us or fed into this sentient soon to be sentient being will this actually allow it to become something which is original so I'm hoping.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Okay now this I think we are going into the realms of
Ram Madhvani: philosophy so but you're going to get that if you were if you if you ask me I you'll always get that
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: but in the market where there is already a deluge and we are not films don't compete only with streaming or before films compete with anything that competes for the audience's time and attention so it's an attention game whether it's reels whether it's YouTube videos which teach you how to make a roti it could be anything so you're in a market where there is a deluge and there's a deluge of user generated as I call it and professionally generated and we are in the professionally generated space there's a further deluge and I'm not saying you guys are creating it but AI will create already I can see reels so many reels are just AI yeah they're rubbish but and it'll improve in scale what does it mean you know when you add this one element you know
Vikram Malhotra: to your point and I'm going to equate it straight away with content creation or generation as you've referred to it to begin with we never use the word content generation till about a year ago see how it's entered our vocabulary because of a tech change you know why electricity became so central to mankind not because of the invention because it was easy and affordable I'm saying similarly anyone with a device and a reasonable amount of access to platforms is a creator today the difference is is that result of creativity worth your time and attention currently what's happening is we are seeing a very base level of work populate all platforms and therefore has become front and centre of everything that we think is being created by AI therefore popular myths and dooms cries about this will replace actors this will replace creativity the minute it comes in the right hands we build aeon on human first AI empowered this is not about a replacement to your point if creative data exists if work has been done the technology itself is generative it's supposed to get better whether we like it or not we are in a phase of AI where we are still beginning to get to general intelligence we are far away from what is being predicted as doom in this continuum far away in this continuum could mean next year not necessarily a hundred years but to me the ability to generate and be productive is at the centre of what's
Ram Madhvani: happening right now in our business but the reason I was laughing is because there is a like-heartedness about what he says and the way he says it and so it was a laugh of uh this uh recognition
Vikram Malhotra: of endorsement together we've been labelled as people who are who are breaking the norm in maybe not such a nice way no but i'll tell you i'll just just to interrupt for a moment which is
Ram Madhvani: so i did the kindle ad which uh came uh the first time that kindle came into india i've just done the ad for perplexity okay oh yeah yeah so uh and i'm a great kindle believer and everybody who says oh but you know i like paper i like books there are lots of books of course which i also read but i also read the kindle and i keep telling everybody why don't you if you really feel that you know that's not the way then why don't you go back with before the printing press and why don't you read a book on the rock on rocks you know which is that's where it was meant to be so why don't you go to sleep and get some rocks in your
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: bed and it's okay people have different but i think i think all medium coexist you know the radio still exists the newspaper still exists everything still exists still exists but my my point is not at all about replacing actors or anything or is it just in your head right now it's about reaching a new audience telling you you know because you're so much into art and history and just telling those stories through vr i mean is that
Ram Madhvani: so um i'm just i'll do a little bit of a diversion before i i get to your question uh there is data mining and there is data swamping and what you're really looking at is if the data is already there then are we limited by the data and i'm saying to you that okay forgetting the legality of it and the copyright of it and all of those things we'll come to as we travel ourselves in this entire you know sort of matrix of what this is but uh the i think currently one of the problems i'm having is that there is not enough indian data so the we're once more getting colonised we were colonised by space then we threw them out then we are colonised in our minds by the clothing and the food that we were that we eat and the music that we listen to and now we're being colonised by data and because the the data that is there within whatever there is is currently not eastern enough and my biggest problem with creating material and i went to the ai or india's first ai film festival and i was part of the jury there yeah yeah whatever two weeks ago both of you were there i couldn't make it so basically i what i told them is that guys can we have stories that are culturally rooted now to create stories that are culturally rooted you're going to have to have data which is culturally rooted do we have enough data in there which is genuinely data that we have fed in there is a great film that i saw recently called humans in the loop which you must see because it's about a lady in jharkhand who has to be who has to identify whether this sort of caterpillar like a pest is it a pest or is it actually not a pest now as far as that data is concerned or the feeding of that data is really where the biggest problem lies and so if you go down to the root of where it is then the data that was fed into us the data that has been fed into ai is it eastern enough did my education which was the data that was fed into me colonise me
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: i i don't know because i think we are we're getting homogenised as storytelling entities and i think streaming has done that to us it has homogenised access it is homogenised to great extent creation it is not homogenised tastes they remain different and therefore we work so i may be watching nordic shows or turkish shows or something and i know if you say that each each ethnic thing has to have separate data i don't know i really it's a very interesting thought
Ram Madhvani: well it it should it not given the fact that our food does and they tried very hard to colonise our taste and we we've so far resisted we've been free for 70 years yes but still they've been trying all the time okay with music with clothing with everything and so therefore i do have a problem with western colonisation on data and i feel that uh soon obviously we will be feeding our own data into this because what is being given back to me when i feed stuff and this is what i saw at the film festival which is i said to them guys uh you are being limited by when you prompt which is no you're no longer a director you're a prompt engineer okay so when you're when you're asking the machine the ai to do something what it's giving you is stuff which is not part of our ways of telling it is not part of our ways of seeing so you can't actually and it's not our colour
Vikram Malhotra:
and that's and that's an area i have a slightly different point to doing this uh i think the prompt engineer part of it is one aspect of what we're doing to create content to tell the stories that we are that's precisely the reason why we said a human voice matters at this stage in the ability of ai to create the latest film that we've announced as aeon is a film called jai santoshi mata there's a very strategic reason i make it
Ram Madhvani: i love that film i've i've grown up watching that film deal yeah so i don't know i thought
Vikram Malhotra: i think i saw it as a child 1975 arguably holds the record for the highest number of footfalls gave sholay a run for its money has all that legend around it why are we doing that why are we telling that story again we are telling that story again for two reasons one it has cultural resonance across generations even now i've always believed indians negotiate tradition like the gen z in india visits temples does puja at home they may do it in their own way they may proclaim it or not they may decry it to their friends but that negotiated tradition has stayed so there's relevance what ai is enabling us to do is tell that story in a more contemporary manner obviously it will be based on insights it's not going to be a repetition of the folklore that the story is built around but i come from a point of view that the human voice the teller's voice in the story the writing the play out of that and we are seeing that with the early work that we are doing yes when we started off skin tones was a problem the movement of the mouth was a problem we are overcoming that basis what the directors and the writers are telling the tech side of it to do aeon is not abundant is not aspiring to be a tech company we are saying we understand the creative ecosystem and we are open-minded about technology how can we leverage that with the real tech players who also get the same so i believe that that the indianising or the localising for a global market is one piece of it i believe it will exponentially grow when it's because when everyone has access to everything but that's my point is there were two questions
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: which arose from what are you both you seeing what you both are saying sorry is how expensive is the tech because a lot of people go and outsource the tech stack and say okay now let me do my own thing but a lot of people want to build it up for example z set up a technology centre and they did their own thingy they didn't use it in so much in the creative part but they used it to figure out or use predictive analysis on what story arcs will work and these two work on those story and they've actually pushed up their ratings bit by bit by bit i can you believe this is this
Ram Madhvani: is now the indoctrination and the when you're talking about homogeneity you're talking about how stories are actually now you're being told how to tell a story but i worry about originality in i agree with you because this is the handcuffs these are handcuffs you're being told it's like
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: the algo yeah if the algo is driving what you read or what you watch on reels or wherever and this is like an algo driving what you see to me what i don't know is that we tend to be
Vikram Malhotra: fascinated by the immorality of all of this not immorality no i'm by the lack of originality because it's all been ghettos then my point my point on this is why are we worried about what the algo is throwing up for us to be consumed by instead of consuming in the hands of the right people the algo should actually be giving strength to the creator and the platform in where it needs to go so if somebody is telling you that like where have we used this to our advantage horror we are being told there's a latent need for this genre we've had two big successes in this in the last few years and we are investing more and building more stories including at Aon that didn't come from repetitive algo that just came from understanding that there's not enough Indian content in that genre being served absolutely the lens i tend to take on this is more of let's look out to the future with more positivity than with Bari to your point yeah i don't know how expensive dollars are going into ai as we speak this level of investment is unprecedented in the history of mankind now that is not going to make or or going in to make ai inaccessible it's going in to make ai accessible and cheaper democratising the use which is why i gave the example of electricity now if that becomes cheaper obviously there are going to be different degrees i mean there is a creativity of somebody who's doing it or making a reel from a phone and there is a film that ram makes there is a world of difference between them there are films that we produce that run into crores versus a short form micro drama which is made for 5000 rupees a minute that template is not going to change but what will change is what you're doing
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: with the ability but vikram how much of is and this is something ram can comment on how i sometimes find that a lot of it is driven by valuation you know for example a chat gpt huge amount of valuation refuses to pay copyright owners for their content so there is and that is why i talk about conflict you know and i talk about originality but maybe that's not a debate for filmmakers to have but how much of it is driven in india i haven't seen companies say announce you know if a yrf or a dharma or somebody says you know at that scale that then i would think okay they want to sell a chunk of the company in that but is how much of it is driven by valuation how much is pure
Vikram Malhotra: creative valuation is a reward for your future ability correct and to provide disproportionate returns on whatever someone else's investment that is a sentimental play in our business because in our business scale doesn't exist as manufacturing you have no correct plants or goods on the shelves that allow you for tangibility so valuation will come from a promise if someone's doing cutting edge work if a young company like abundantia if an independent high quality creative company like ram and amita's is doing the work that they're doing there's disproportionate valuation compared to legacy companies correct because we are raiding into the future with what the what is being rewarded in the future versus legacy models today if we are able to do a film driven by ai or capture time and attention in wallet share by content experiences in vr we are taking the audience away from legacy companies i promise you that and that gets rewarded as valuation now extrapolate this to become a legacy company ourselves very soon hopefully that's what we aim to become never never let us wear a t-shirt legacy is dead but but that same thing is happening for the larger p companies no ram because he said
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: about the future if i was to ask you to fantasise what it is that you'd love to see with this thing you're doing with vr or with ai as a filmmaker you know two years down the line three years or
Ram Madhvani: whenever what would i'm very curious to know what would it be uh so first i just want to go back to something which uh is on uh the algorithm for a moment because i come from advertising so i believe okay so i think research and algorithms are important to for us to know my problem right now is i'm debating the indoctrination of storytelling so i'm going to go a little sideways again before i answer your question which is the indoctrination of storytelling has become westernised again which is that it is an aristotelian poetics three act or five act structure and therefore the indian natya shastra way of telling rasas or the very idea that we use songs lip-sync songs are all things which is dying and i get a little scared about therefore again the fact that when even when i now go to studios there is the heroes are there is the um you know and i'm and i'm writing those stories myself with that in mind and i was rebelling against that at some point and now i have accepted it myself say the dark night of the soul has to happen at the end of this whatever you know and people are also looking at stories which is my first audience which is when i go to the studio or the financier where i'm looking at that or the co-producer and that's exactly what they've been also told so there is a templatization of storytelling and so my worry is not on being receiving feedback but my worry is on a greater question which has none which has no answers okay which is personal which is personal which is i will therefore try and see so i did a course at bombay university on indian aesthetics on the natya shastra let's understand what is it on the rasa theory that they told us rather than what is it in the three-act structure that they told us okay uh so this is something which is more on a personal private front and therefore i'm hoping that virtual reality if i give it to you is purely part of in some ways reducing the attention deficit economy first of all when you put this on i'm hoping that i capture you okay second i am in the goose flesh business
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: okay that's a quotable quote as a journalist i must tell you that
Ram Madhvani: i want to give you goose flesh because once i when you when people tell me oh your film gave me goose flesh okay there is no better compliment than that okay it's better than what i do sometimes which is your film made me cry because i'm interested in tragedy as something which we have forgotten because uh and therefore that is the other thing that i'm hoping that when i when you when you get to see uh in whichever way that you experience that feeling i'm hoping that we are will allow you to experience that feeling the darkened hall of the cinema allowed you to experience a feeling which was very public and private now i i don't think that if i showed you ninja on your phone and you were watching it in the plane i don't think you'd cry in the same way as you would in the theatre and the catharsis that you feel is not going to be the same i'm hoping that with this new experience i will take you back to what actually the whole business of what we're doing which is really the business of feelings yeah i'm not even telling stories but i'm here to affect
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: you in your you know sort of stomach and you're hoping that these new tools will help you do that
Ram Madhvani: i'm hoping that in this entire you know sort of devices and i'm okay with all of it i'm okay with seeing on the phone i'm okay in imax i'm okay but why not this too and therefore i'm hoping that instead of your uh mind now as it is its second screen and third screen and all this is all hitting us right and in instead of your mind being uh limited by a frame which was in some ways the aspect ratio of what it was for the theatre then became your phone and now i'm thinking why why are tvs not vertical okay it's high time that we had a television set that was vertical let's make vertical tvs because that format has been just like told to us just because somebody told cinema has to be like this so therefore why can't vr give you a 360 experience if you are allowed this aspect ratio and that aspect ratio why can't you be allowed that aspect ratio no but so that for you as a filmmaker would be the would be the future in in in the only reason is so that i can give you a feeling that perhaps you won't get anywhere else and as you have seen when you have seen the vr which i must say that since aeon uh vikram keeps saying i keep saying oh my company is called equinox virtual so i have to plug that in i better plug that in okay it's called equinox
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: virtual okay no but vikram if if i was to uh i asked ram as a filmmaker less as the head of a firm but do you you know you have you have this revenue target but what do you see aeon doing say three years down the line for
Vikram Malhotra: enhancing productivity improving our margins allowing us to get more and more diverse creators to give their best and reaching out to an audience across the world which is the first
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: movie which is coming out from aeon or our first piece of work jay santoshi mata and a horror film
Vikram Malhotra: that's in development and hanuman is a co-production with collective artists network but purely as aeon it will be the horror film and jay santoshi and by when are we looking at this
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: by the end of 2026 both should be out inshallah it should do well that should be nice yeah you
Ram Madhvani: know one of the things that i've been noticing is uh will uh ai because of its current limitations um force you to tell the story in a different way like there are ways that we if i was to shoot like you're shooting this it tells you shoot it in the way that we've been taught over the last hundred or so years that cinema has been existing from the lumiere brothers or you know or you know telling us about the train or whatever it was right yeah yeah train coming to yeah exactly station i'm forgetting yeah and then the language of cinema was invented by griffith and asenstein and all the rest of that and now is this going to actually and i'm fascinated by that i don't think that's a problem i think one of the things ai is doing is doing nature really well guess what the forests are looking great the rivers are looking great water is looking great and so more and more i'm now finding that whenever there is some problem like if the audio says and therefore many years passed before the queen got a child now normally what would happen is that the way that you visualise that would be like okay then you know there may be some time lapse kind of stuff but you'll eventually see the queen you know sort of but now what happens is i'm now saying uh you know the prompt engineer saying look that queen i'll show the river and in that i'll show some clouds and i'll show some forest and therefore guess what ai is actually generating stuff that is natural
Vikram Malhotra: we gave two scenes from our in development horror film one of our partners and those involved the monster as was visualised by the writers what came back for one of the scenes was this is this is as good as we can do this what you've the other scene they were like hang on what if we were able to give you this and this and we will create a world around this and it also had the power to do this and we change the physicality to do this it's taking disbelieving creators i speak this out of daily experience it's taking disbelieving creators a matter of hours to get converted verita i'm seeing this with my own eyes the writers looked at that and then looked at my creative team and they're like because it's coming from understand what it's doing to them it's allowing them to get better in their imagination they're they're no holds barred what ram just said why are we suddenly seeing these beautiful worlds being created you know to be honest i saw should i say i saw the first look of something recently which earlier would have been a magnum opus done theatrically and i saw the younger colleagues at work who were looking at it and the conversation was this is being done better in ai that's the change why are we running away from what the audience of tomorrow is going to benchmark us against and one big thought that i'm going to leave you with and i know ram's already looked into this for decades india has been behind in the film business where it comes to technology and vfx and cgi and investments in these as compared to our western peers yeah we were the sweatshop we were the sweatshop or we were just doing low bro low
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: we have a dna i mean you have a namit doing some he's walked over a company yeah yeah so
Vikram Malhotra: i'm saying at a general level yeah right at a general level and i'm making a consumer side statement it's not as much a manufacturer side statement so our audience has been exposed to a majority of that level of work now when we are raising our game we can actually export this to the west because this is where playing field is level you have the same public tools that are available to anyone in the west that are available to creators in india and you see how this changes which is why it's that fundamental opportunity that we are latching on to and saying much like how a medical science business or education or manufacturing is being revolutionised this business has the front and centre potential to be irreversibly changed with
Ram Madhvani: ai now the question is is ai therefore going to be democratic is it capitalistic or is it
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: colonialism i think colonialism is your favourite word rama i've decided but but but i think it's going to be a mishmash and we really don't know because it's it's not just ai operating independently it is society ai it's a kaleidoscopic thing which is we've not had this since
Ram Madhvani: the internet huh and the last time that this thing happened was when the internet everyone said why
Vikram Malhotra: internet and the internet still required you to follow protocol still required you to operate in a framework still required you to be on the other side the world wide web as it evolved initially this is you doing it and by the way a lot of ai now and going into the future is going to be what a human wants out of it yeah or what a human is engineering it for until we reach to super intelligence which is the crystal ball got thrown out many many months ago in this business but
Ram Madhvani: right now it's about what the human wants from it but you know having actually spoken this last now it is already beyond the 45 minutes that you wanted but while we are here embracing technology and ai i don't think that vikram or me are actually saying that we're not making films and series we are also and that is most certainly also part of the stuff that we do i hear that we're not displacing the human being not at all exactly what we are doing is empowering the human being
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: actually i think we veered a little philosophic and so so that's why you know it may seem like blame it on me no no i i you know i've been grappling with this in my head also but you know i'll end with something that anand mahindra told me years back right there was a there's a new type of software vikram you probably heard it erp of course the enterprise resource planning it came 25 years back or something and i used to cover tech in those days right and i remember everybody got very excited everybody was calling it out was the buzzword and i i remember uh asking anand mahindra but if all your competitors have the software and all their processes are as streamlined as yours what does it mean for your business what's your company so he says you know what when the if you've been to germany or any the autobahns the roads are the same quality it's a skill of the driver which matters now of course it's driverless cars that's there's another debate there but i think it's the tools are available to everybody but the it's like i said
Vikram Malhotra: what the human wants out of it how you can use the tool to unlock what you would have otherwise.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: not been able to do correct till the human is taken over till the humans are taken over then yes yes we rest our case thank you guys were lovely talking to you i wish we could have a little more of that philosophy thing you know but unfortunately i told you what my i'll tell
Ram Madhvani: you what my i was telling you like i want to make a short film where we are in the middle of the krishna is you know sort of telling us about the bhagavad-gita and you know um hand taps his shoulder and says uh excuse me says that sentient being can i talk to you about consciousness
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: please that's the note i want to end on then that's the note i want to end on thank you so much
