Comic relief: The makers of 'The Archies' on their new film

Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti on adapting 'Archie' for India and the big screen, and why kids are a tough audience 

- Raja Sen

Zoya Akhtar knows the value of a double digest. The director of films like Luck By Chance and Gully Boy used to cycle in the early 1980s to lending libraries on Hill Road, Bandra, Mumbai, to unearth issues of Archie Comics. Sometimes, however, she would get to buy one. “If you got a new one from the bookstore,” she gushes, “that was a real treat. The double digest, the big 500-pagers, those were big treats that you shared and exchanged. You opened that comic and you were transported to this fictional, magical place.”

Akhtar’s latest film The Archies comes out on Netflix on 7 December, and the day after I watched the film, I sat with her and co-writer Reema Kagti to talk about Reggie Mantle, Archie Andrews and that Riverdale crew those of a certain vintage know so well. The film stars Agastya Nanda as Archie Andrews, Suhana Khan as Veronica Lodge, Khushi Kapoor as Betty Cooper, Mihir Ahuja as Jughead Jones, Vedang Raina as Reggie Mantle, Yuvraj Menda as Dilton Doiley, and Dot as Ethel Muggs.

 

The character names stay the same and have not been Indian-ised—unlike, say, Peter Parker and Mary Jane becoming Pavitr Prabhakar and Meera Jain in the mercifully shortlived Spider-Man: India comic series—therefore Akhtar was sure to set her film within the Christian community. Instead of opting for a city, they chose to set the film in an idyllic hill station in the 1960s. “You had that kind of space, that colonial architecture and that community base, like Landour or Mccluskieganj, those places existed,” says Akhtar. “The culture of country clubs, the culture of fashion. They are Westernised in a sense, music is big with Anglo-Indians, food is big with Anglo-Indians, and they were liberal in the sense of dating and stuff.”