Despite the bleak setting and the weight of the topics covered, Pyre is suffused with humour. The central couple are delightful. Like many long-married spouses, they seem to treat bickering as a love language.
Kapri, who is from Uttarakhand, got the idea for the film in 2018 after meeting an 84-year-old man in Munsiyari, a scenic hill town in the state.
“I visited him after seeing his photo in a Facebook post. The wrinkles on his face really fascinated me. His face was unique.”
Kapri said he asked him and his wife what their biggest worry was.
“He said, ‘My biggest worry is, if I die first, who is going to take care of her?’ And she said, ‘He doesn’t know how to cook. So if I die first, I don’t know who is going to cook food for him.’ That was so heartwarming for me.”
Kapri says he initially tried to make his film with “the real couple”, but abandoned the idea after a week of shooting, when it became clear it was not working. He then approached actors Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak – a couple themselves – for the lead roles.
Shah loved the script, Kapri says, but felt that he and Pathak did not belong to the region and would struggle to do justice to the characters.
Kapri finally found his Padam Singh within his own family – his father’s younger brother, a retired army soldier who expressed an interest in acting. He found his Tulsi in another village. Heera Devi, an elderly widow, had raised her children through years of farming, cutting grass and tending to her buffalo.
