The third Drishyam film has become a runaway blockbuster, and its writer Aamil Keeyan Khan, who shares screenplay credit with Parveez Shaikh and director Abhishek Pathak, has opened up the thinking behind the film’s all-important final act.
November 18, by design
One detail fans latched onto: Christopher Pinto’s grave carries November 18, the same date Drishyam 2 released. Khan confirmed it was deliberate, and, as it happens, also his birthday. “It was a call taken by the direction team, since the previous Drishyam had been released on November 18,” he said, laughing at the overlap. He added that Pinto’s birth date was originally meant to be July 1 rather than July 2, which would have handed Abhishek Pathak a birthday Easter egg instead.
Cracking the last 30 minutes
Pathak has said the film was written from the climax backwards. For Khan, the harder task was deciding the order in which revelations land. With each instalment, he argued, the audience walks in knowing Vijay Salgaonkar will have a plan; the surprise has to live in the execution, not the crime.
- Begin with the trap and the escape: how Vijay gets caught, and how he gets out.
- Sequence what the audience learns, and when, for maximum impact.
- The end monologue was written first, in Goa, then debated and retained.
- Every scene had to serve the main plot; no nostalgic walk-ons for their own sake.
In Khan’s words, the franchise runs on a simple rule: “Kaise kiya is what gives the audience a high.” What Vijay did is never the problem; how he did it is the show.
Restraint, and the Pav Bhaji callback
Khan credits Pathak for the Pav Bhaji line, which Gaitonde delivers to big laughs. The dish has become an annual meme on October 2, and the team looked for an organic way to fold it in. Martin Uncle, by contrast, was deliberately left out: café scenes were relocated, and Pathak did not want any scene that had no bearing on the main plot.
Why it ends
Khan was firm that the story is complete. “You should know when to leave the ring,” he said, adding that if pressed he could argue through why the film cannot logically be extended. On Ajay Devgn, he reversed the credit: the actor and the Devgn Films-Panorama Studios setup had been like family, and Devgn’s repeated collaborators reflect loyalty rather than mere stardom.
For readers who follow Hindi cinema closely, the revelation is a reminder that franchise filmmaking at this level depends less on the twist than on the arrangement of information. Drishyam’s power has always been procedural: the audience is less interested in whether Vijay is guilty than in how the script makes him escape. That discipline is worth noting as Bollywood builds more legacy IP.
Source: bollywoodHungama.com
Comments