Lights, Camera, Story!

Rachit Gupta in conversation with the talented cinematographer of Kahaani 2, Tapan Basu.

- Rachit Gupta

Tapan Basu has been a cinematographer for over 300 ad films in the last five years. During his exhaustive ad film career he’s managed to work with some big names like Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar and Priyanka Chopra. His most frequent collaborators have been filmmakers like Amit Sharma, Nitesh Tiwari and Abhinay Deo. But his first feature film breakthrough happened with Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani 2.

Tapan has a bit of a reputation in the filmmaking circuit of being choosy. Back in 2013, Sujoy Ghosh was fresh off the success of Kahaani and he sent Tapan a script. “I wrote to Sujoy to tell him that even though the script was interesting, I’d have to pass it on. I always wanted my first feature to be a thriller. It had to be something like Kahaani or Kaminey,” he shares. But destiny brought them back together. “In 2015, I was to travel to Europe. But the trip got cancelled.

Just then I got a call from Sujoy urging me to meet him in Kolkata. There he narrated the script of Durga Rani Singh, the original title of Kahaani 2 to me. He said, ‘You wanted to work on a thriller right? Here you go!’ Imagine I had Kahaani 2 in my lap,” he recalls.