Director Vishal Bhardwaj and his crew take us back to the 1990s, telling us how they brought alive O Romeo, the story of a forgotten gangster lost in the pages of Mumbai’s history
In O Romeo, Shahid Kapoor plays a character rumoured to be based on Hussain Ustara, a real-life enemy of Dawood Ibrahim, while Triptii Dimri plays Afsha, linked to the story of Sapna Didi, a female don
Mumbai’s underworld in the 1990s didn’t look like a movie. If the trailer of Vishal Bhardwaj's new film O Romeo is anything to go by, it looked like peeling paint, imitation silk and metal slowly losing its sheen. That is the city Bhardwaj rebuilds in O Romeo. Inspired by characters in Hussain Zaidi and Jane Borges’ Mafia Queens of Mumbai and evolving from the long-shelved Sapna Didi story he held on to for nearly a decade, the film is less about gangsters as legends and more about the worlds that made them. But the film’s milieu - its grime, its romance and its violence are placed in a deeply researched world.
For Bhardwaj, cinema’s job is precisely this act of remembering. He tells us, “Cinema is a mirror of society. It can change the world, but actually it reflects society and shows us our real face, which we are very afraid to see. To me, it's like journalistic work, like a journalist, like a newspaper, which records life, time, similarly, cinema records the problems of its time, the celebration of its time, the problems of its time, society, politics, everything is recorded in it, like a history.”
Vishal Bhardwaj on the set of O Romeo
That philosophy drives O Romeo. The film may be stylised, but its world is documented like lived history. Costume designer Maxima Basu walked that careful line between history and invention, she tells us. “The film is based on a fictional story in the 90s. Although it’s inspired on true characters, it still is a interpretation of the events. So in a way we had to stick to the 90s vibe, but I would say we have taken a little leap from reality, so that we do not attribute the characters to any person present in the history of the underworld.”
That “leap” meant Basu and her team built the wardrobe. “Films style has been researched through a lot of 90s news footage, news clippings, internet footage, interviews of police officers and the IB guys conducted by journalists, their reference points in Dongri area during the 90s underworld dominance in Mumbai.”
But the underworld of the 1990s didn’t exist in isolation from popular culture. Basu points out that Bollywood itself shaped how gang figures saw themselves. “I must admit that I took influence also from the Bollywood styling in the 90s, which was a very popular medium among the gangs. If you notice some of Afsha's clothes (Triptii Dimri), they are actually mildly inspired by the silhouettes of some 90s actresses, although we never wanted anything on the face or completely slapped from popular styling in the movies.”
Instagram archives dedicated to 90s fashion, old family albums from crew members who grew up in Mumbai and Bhardwaj’s own inputs, along with those of writer Hussain Dalal, helped shape Ustara’s world. Every outfit is custom-designed, period-appropriate “The element of style is the film’s own creation,” Basu says.
If costumes locate the people, production designer Mustafa Stationwala defines the look and feel of the film. And it all began with one image, a wrecked ship which is Ustara's den (Shahid Kapoor). “First location was the ship wreck, the deck and the bedroom from where the view is off the world he lives full of hardship and rusticity. And that’s how the further course of design and the color palette evolved. Earthy rustic full of metal and rust desaturated muted tone became the language of the film.”
Ustara’s base of operations is corroded, wind-beaten, exposed. He adds, “The ship deck where his throne is from where the business is run and the moment he is under the roof on the deck which is kitchen and the bedroom is the emotional space starts and which is control by Dadi.”
The emotional temperature of the film is built into surfaces. Stationwala’s team aged everything by hand. “We have aged the set with the theory in mind as how this place will naturally go under wear and tear will be our process. Luckily we always kept time separately for aging and it was in layers and lot of hand aging. And the world was defined by the crack in the metal in which you will see the bright orange and red flow of rust was the striking combination of emotional high and low in the film. As I always believe in declutter so we have not clutter the space but just enhance the spaces with the characterization and the demand of the scene. Because sometimes in clutter your character is lost.”
The film travels beyond Mumbai to Spain, but the emotional palette remains continuous. “Between Mumbai and Spain we have kept the color palette same but architectural language is naturally different. In Mumbai metal and rust was the play and in Spain brownish rock and the wear and tear on it was the base, but common ground was the earthy tone throughout the film. So I will say it will be smooth transition between two countries than a hard cut off in the visual language.” Opposing Ustara’s shipwreck world is Jalal’s (Avinash Tiwary) stone mansion.
For cinematographer Ben Bernhard, the biggest challenge was reality intruding on period. He tells us, “The most challenging element wasn’t a single sequence but the location of the ship that serves as our hero Ustara’s base and anchors much of the film. While visually striking, the location posed major challenges in lighting due to its size, wind conditions near shore, and constantly changing continuity of a running dockyard.”
Night shoots were particularly difficult, as modern skylines and LED lighting threatened to break the 90s illusion. Since the ship exterior had to match later studio interiors, visual cohesion became a technical puzzle the team had to solve together.
O Romeo carries the emotional weight of the abandoned Sapna Didi film. Bhardwaj held on to this world for years — because, for him, underworld stories are not about crime alone, but about love, loss, and human longing. “Love is the source of life and without love there is no existence. The whole this existence is showing love all the time, 24 hours, from flowers to stars. It's all, if you see, there is all love around, from sunlight to moonlight, from every aspect of life. Be it the fragrance of flowers, or the warmth of sunlight, or the cool breeze, nature is showering love all around you. And what happens is that we see life through our mind, through our mental state. If we are in a good mental state, then everything is rosy. And if our mental state is bad, then no matter how beautiful we are, we can't see anything. When we pass through a path, if we are in a bad mood, we can't see anything. And when we are in a good mood, we see small things. So love is the foundation of our life. So without romance, without love, there is no life, so there is no film.”
That emotional core found a crucial ally in producer Sajid Nadiadwala, whom Bhardwaj credits with enabling the film’s scale and sensitivity. “Working with Sajid Bhai was truly a unique and fulfilling experience. He represents a rare balance between the freedom of an independent producer and the discipline of a studio-driven approach, a combination that’s becoming increasingly uncommon. He owns a film like his own child, with deep personal investment and unwavering belief. He never looks at a project purely through the lens of money, but through the emotion and soul of the film. He gave me everything I had dreamed of for this project, and more.”
Perhaps Bhardwaj is right to point out that Nadiadwala represents the last of his kind old-school producer who still cares about films and not see them as deliverables. It is telling that O Romeo is the film heralding Nadiadwala Grandson Entertainment's entry into its 75th year, reaffirming how belief comes before business for some still. That spirit runs through Bhardwaj’s film. This isn’t a project engineered for a date on the calendar. This is cinema, as cinema should be- patiently, painstakingly created by people who still believe the magic of the 70mm.
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