Ram Gopal Varma on GUNS and THIGHS' story

- his most ambitious project -

My only objective of foraying into the digital world is to be able to tell stories which I otherwise would have never been allowed to tell on the film screen.

My first production for this platform will be the 10-episode Season One (4 seasons total) of a Series titled GUNS and THIGHS.

The title is derived as a synonym of how Power and Sex affect the internal politics of the crime world.

I was fortunate to find in Germany based Boris Groenemeyer (Stormcell Entertainment) a passionate producer, who exactly understood the intention behind this project.

After reading the subject matter, he found a mutual common ground in both of us having an immense respect for larger than life emotions, and he was eager to showcase the highly dramatic stories of Mumbai Mafia as told by me to an international audience. This forged a great and fruitful partnership between both of us.

The story of the entire series of GUNS and THIGHS is something I have gathered over the years in my various interactions with ex-gangsters, encounter cops, middlemen of the underworld, their victims' relatives and so on.

Some in the know might feel that I have dealt with this subject matter in my earlier films like SATYA and COMPANY, but nothing could be further from the truth. That's because in those films, I barely scratched the surface of the truth of the Mafia's underbelly due to my inconclusive knowledge and also due to various other restrictions, but here in this series I decided to tell it all the way it is.

This Series is as much intended for the international audience as it is for the youth in India, who were either not born then or were too young to register the turbulent times the city of Mumbai went through during that time period and I strongly believe this Series will document that era for those who did not witness it first hand.

Mumbai, one of the world's ten most populated cities, with nearly 20 million people, is also the financial capital of India; but ironically it's the heartbreaking visuals of poverty that showcases most of the city.

Dharavi, the world's largest slum, thousands of pavement dwellers, pot hole ridden roads, buildings which look like they will collapse any minute are merely the tip of the iceberg of MUMBAI's overall poverty.

The only slivers of light, escaping this darkness of MUMBAI at that time were the once in a while occasional glow of the hidden riches of a few wealthy business companies, the extremely false glitter of the Bollywood film companies and the violently ruled Mafia companies. It is no wonder that such a wild concoction would inevitably give rise to a volatile and very potent crime culture. In such a turbulent atmosphere where a few incredibly rich, and millions of downright poor live right next to each other, fuelled by the misleading fantasies of a glamourous film world, crime is bound to prosper and as expected criminal gangs flourished in MUMBAI for decades, till they were reasonably reigned in by the mid-2000's.

The most powerful of all the gangs to rule MUMBAI was the D COMPANY, named after its leader Dawood Ibrahim who, along with his partner Chhota Rajan, held the city in a stranglehold for a very long time.

But then a chain of events led to a dangerous split between Dawood and Rajan, which broke up the D COMPANY and to seize this opportunity a lot of other gangs jumped into the fray to stake their own claim for the top spot.

This created a massive outburst of criminal activities including extortion and contract killings, and the resulting gang wars created a demand for hitmen, which in turn generated a very lucrative business for the ever hungry recruiters of the Mumbai Mafia and they got busy sourcing potential killers from the badlands of interior India.

This was also the time period which saw the heights of a never before bed hopping nexus between the Mafia, the Film people, the Cops and the Businessmen/Politicians.

It is these times that GUNS and THIGHS as a series is intending to capture through the relationship/conflict detailing of its various dynamically larger than life and yet extremely human characters.

It's my strong belief that GUNS and THIGHS will rip open the real truth of the Mumbai Mafia.

Ram Gopal Varma