Mumbai: When the Mughals were on a decline and the British on the rise, the power game was up in the air with everyone vying for it but one Naga Sadhu was marching to his own beats for revenge: that's how director Navdeep Singh defines his latest, Laal Kaptaan.
The film, set roughly 25 years after the historical Battle of Buxar of 1764, features Saif Ali Khan as a "renegade, lone wolf, revenge-driven" Naga Warrior.
Navdeep, who has helmed NH10 and Manorama Six Feet Under, calls Laal Kaptaan an Indian Western.
The idea for Laal Kaptaan comes from a line he had read in a book as a kid, which stayed with him: 'Till a few hundred years ago, a man with ambition and brain could pick up a sword and carve out a kingdom for himself.'
Navdeep extended the idea of being able to do anything and set it in Bundelkhand in the period between the decline of the Mughals and the emergence of the British.
The director said that Laal Kaptaan is not about historical events but a personal fictional story played out against this real historical backdrop.
The germ of the story came to him when he was reading about Begum Samru, who took over the kingdom of her husband Walter Reinhardt Sombre, near Delhi.
The history book had a mention of Battle of Buxar, which cemented the role of the British in India.
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"I read about it some 15 years ago and slowly I started to read more about it, the history of Naga Sadhus. They were a fascinating group in an exhilarating period, influential politically and militarily. It was an eye-opener."
What followed was combining an idea he and his co-writer Deepak Venkatesha already had and coming up with Laal Kaptaan in under a year.
"Deepak and I had discussed a story idea for a long time which was contemporary. We kept thinking where to set it, how to go about as it was a one line idea. Then we merged these two ideas into one. One was a bunch of characters and a backdrop and one was a plot idea."
Saif plays a Naga Sadhu, a bounty hunter, who finds people who have rewards on their heads.
The director says his character is looking for a particular man for revenge for 20 years, which is why "he wanders the lands with blood on his mind. Bounty hunter is his side sustenance."
In the film, also featuring Deepak Dobriyal, Zoya Hussain, most of the characters are nameless.
"We call Saif's character The Hunter, Deepak's called The Tracker, Zoya is called The Widow. There are no names to characters in the film.
"In the first draft of the film, the title was The Hunter, The Widow and The Hanging Tree which sounds like a Western but obviously there was no Hindi translation so it became Laal Kaptaan."
The title comes from the British East India Army Company jacket Saif's Naga Warrior wears in the film.
"There's a bit of a story on how he acquires it. Since it defines his character and the way he looks, we thought it could be the kind of thing people call him- Laal Kaptaan. We want people to find out who this man is and what he has on his mind," he adds.
Laal Kaptaan is scheduled to release on October 18.
With inputs from PTI
