Anand Bhaskar: Write to the story, edit to visuals

Emraan Hashmi-led web offering Showtime marks composer Anand Bhaskar’s third collaboration with director Mihir Desai. The project, says Bhaskar, came as a relief to the duo, who had, until then worked on shows that were ‘left-of-centre’.

Bhaskar, with offerings like Mirzapur and Masoom to his credit, discusses why his working style fits the web space.

Edited excerpts of the interview.

When this project came your way, what was your understanding of the requirements of the five numbers that you were appointed to create?

I’ve worked on five songs, and the score of this project. I have been working with Mihir for eight years, after we first began to work on Mirzapur. For a while, we had been wanting to work on a commercial film, because we had been working on projects that were, well, left-of-centre. This one is based on Bollywood politics, so I was interested.

When we started working on it, we created everything, from pop, to jazz, and hip-hop to rock. We narrowed it down to hip-hop, electronic music, and rock. He liked the rock-based themes I wrote. But as things progressed, we realised that the music should lean towards hip-hop, pop and electronic.

That’s how the musical landscape was built. Because they were simultaneously building the script, and I’d often play pieces of music to him during our meetings, they used some of my pieces in the edits to build [both] worlds simultaneously. This is the process I follow with all my clients—I prefer to work from