In July, the well-known film rating and interview, Film Companion, went silent. The website had its standalone play in FC Studios—an in-house speciality division for long-form storytelling.
On the birth of FC Studios, Anupama Chopra, founder of Film Companion, in an interview with afaqs!, reveals that the idea evolved while she was working on the documentary Modern Masters: SS Rajamouli. While in the process of making the documentary, she decided that there was more to this kind of series, digging out interesting aspects of Indian cinema.
For the last 30 years, I have managed to document Indian cinema in every which way possible—through magazines, television, YouTube, books, and articles. As a journalist and film critic, coming together to create long-form storytelling about Indian cinema, entertainment, and pop culture felt like a natural next step,” she explains.
FC Studios to carry on the legacy of Film Companion: Anupama Chopra
She feels Indian cinema hasn’t been well archived and now with platforms for streaming reaching new horizons, incredible stories about Indian Cinema and the artists connected to it can reach a broader audience worldwide.
“When I wrote my Sholay book in 2000, it was hard to find non-academic books on Indian films everything was steeped in semiotics or academia with little for the casual film lover. Thankfully, this has changed over the past 24 years,” she says.
Netflix has recently released a documentary on the filmmaker’s life, which is the first creation by FC Studios. As Chopra says: “The idea came from my former colleagues, Bharadwaj Ranjan and Avinash Prakash, who created Film Companion South. They presented the idea to me first and then began planning. And then Applause agreed to finance it since FC Studios didn’t have the resources.”.
“We wanted to start with someone whose work has significantly shaped Indian cinema. For us, Rajamouli was the top choice. If he had said no, I’m not sure who we would have started with,” she says.
Chopra likens writing a documentary to that of writing a book – time-consuming. This documentary would have been two years in the making, from idea to finish. She was, however happy because she knew people were watching it, and with Netflix, it was out there.
“I am a book-lover at heart and have written a few myself. The only challenge with books is that not many people actually read them. It’s hard to reach all your audience after spending so much time, love and effort in a book. People all over the world, including non-Indian audiences who loved RRR, are watching this project. Someone even sent me a screenshot from a South American country where they dubbed it, and I was amazed at the reach-it’s so magical and gratifying,” she says.
After Modern Masters, FC Studios has a ton of exciting stuff in the pipeline. But one project has been in the works for at least four years.
“This part of my work requires enormous patience, unlike the instant gratification of YouTube and social media,” she explains. “These projects often take two to three years.”.
But Chopra makes one thing clear: she wants the company to embody the same values as Film Companion. It has to engage, inform, and be credible storytelling about cinema and pop culture with rigour and integrity at its core.
While Chopra is the founder and editorial partner at FC Studios, she has also joined The Hollywood Reporter-India as its editor. This non-competing RP Sanjiv Goenka Group publication allows her to stay involved: “And the long timelines are comforting, as they don’t interfere with my other work.”
Talking of her ventures, in a recent interview to Humans of Bombay, Chopra said she should have hired a chief business officer for Film Companion as numbers were not her forte. With FC Studios, she roped in Tanvi Ajinkya to steer the ship. “She is a brilliant producer and much better with numbers than I am!” she quips.
Ajinkya was earlier heading branded content at Film Companion. In fact, the entire team is from Film Companion. “It has literally been remoulded from the same clay as Film Companion,” she says.
The legacy of the publication also helps FC Studios establish itself too. People already associate the brand with certain qualities, so it doesn’t need to explain what it stands for.
Typically, FC Studios would produce long-form content for platforms built to stream. However, such platforms, in an effort to control costs, have cut back on their content acquisition and creation splurge. How does FC Studios survive?
“FC Studios isn’t just about documentaries. It’s also a boutique studio handling special projects. We’re running a program for Diageo, where two filmmakers—one of whom we took to Cannes—are creating short films. We’re in the second year of Take 10 for Netflix, as well as running the O Womaniya! project for Prime Video. I hope that between documentaries and other work, we’ll navigate through the inevitable dry periods,” she says.
It would also work on branded content. For example, it created the show Through the Lens for the camera brand ARRI, in which Chopra interviewed top cinematographers like Anil Mehta, Senthil, and Sudeep Chatterjee.
That was a brand partnership, but not the usual kind. It helped us to feature figures in storytelling whom we don’t give proper importance to. So we will work on different kind of projects without very evident brand integration. It’s not daily journalism and not promotional interviews as I usually do for Film Companion, she explains.
