When producers at Namah Pictures – Shareen Mantri Kedia, Kishor Arora and Kanwal Kohli – approached him with the rights to Phoolan Devi’s dictated autobiography, his first instinct was to turn them down. He calls himself “a non-resident Indian Punjabi boy” with no natural claim to her story, and after making the International Emmy-winning “Delhi Crime,” he wasn’t sure he wanted to return to material of that intensity at all. Rather than chart her full life, the Hindi-language film, starring Sneha Kumari in the title role, isolates a single 48-hour standoff in which 2,000 armed police and paramilitary personnel surrounded a village to capture her, then 17 years old.
Mehta read the book, which he describes as “harrowing,” hundreds of pages of first-person testimony he initially judged “unfilmable, undepictable.” What changed his mind wasn’t the book itself but a question the producers put to him: find your own relevance to today’s world, and they would back it. That relevance arrived, Mehta says, out of something he’d carried since finishing “Delhi Crime.” The courageous woman at the center of that series survived long enough to give a dying statement, in the hope that her testimony would set a precedent and make the world safer for others. Years later, Mehta felt that hope hadn’t been borne out.
Where “Delhi Crime” centered a protector, “Phoolan” centers the person who has to survive the assault directly and still choose, against every incentive, to keep believing in humanity. Mehta calls what happened to Phoolan Devi a “literal illustration of a gender war” he has never seen depicted anywhere else in recorded history, matched by a resilience he says he’d also never encountered. Mehta says telling her entire life story in one film wasn’t feasible given its scope, and that narrowing the frame to the siege let him explore power, systemic inequality and resistance without compressing decades of biography into a single narrative, while keeping the story from tipping into exploiting her for dramatic effect.
Mehta calls the film’s action language deliberately unlike genre convention. Conventional action cinema, in his description, is built to make violence feel cathartic; he wanted audiences instead to register scale and imbalance as fact rather than spectacle. That extends to the film’s recurring cutaways to animals, insects and birds along the Chambal River, which Mehta says are not a stylistic holdover from his Prime Video series “Poacher” but drawn directly from Phoolan Devi’s own writing.
She wrote of feeling more comfortable among predators in the wild than among human beings, and Mehta says he wanted to honor that comfort by showing nature’s own reaction to what the men mobilizing against her were doing, including what happens to birds that stray too close to attack helicopters. Comparisons to Shekhar Kapur’s 1994 “Bandit Queen” are, in Mehta’s telling, unavoidable and welcome. His reasoning for not simply following in that film’s footsteps is generational: he doesn’t believe today’s audiences would seek that film out on their own, which is part of what convinced him a new telling, built around a single episode rather than her full biography, was worth attempting.
He says he hopes viewers who watch “Phoolan” go on to research the era and the subject themselves. Mehta is candid that his preparation leaned toward the written record over the genre’s screen history, saying of the broader Hindi dacoit-film tradition that “I did more reading than watching, actually.” Research also took Mehta to the actual Chambal valley locations described in Phoolan Devi’s autobiography, where he spoke with villagers old enough to remember the siege firsthand – an episode that was never formally recorded and exists only in her account and the community’s oral memory. One detail from those conversations reshaped the film: multiple villagers independently corroborated the same account of a single officer among the 2,000 who behaved differently from the rest.
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