Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal have opened up on turning producers, saying they wanted to make some really cool stuff. In a conversation with Naman Ramachandran, international correspondent of ‘Variety’, at the Cinevesture International Film Festival 2024 (CIFF), Richa and Ali talked about how they decided to turn producers. They launched their own production company Pushing Buttons Studios in 2021.

Ali, who is best-known for playing ‘Guddu’ in the popular web series ‘Mirzapur’, said: “We wanted to make some cool stuff. We wanted to be a part of the really cool stuff, cool things, and good cinema, good narratives, and suddenly we realise all of that might not be coming our way in the structures that we are already in condition to live with, grow in, and might be living in those bubbles, we wanted to break that.”

Diving deeper, the global actor, who was last seen in the espionage thriller ‘Khufiya’, added: “I know there are a lot of people who are doing that. We already have friends who are some amazing writers with some amazing narratives, and these people are coming home, and we are all jamming and sitting, and then we are like the only thing that is missing is that we are not executing these.

“Somebody else, sits somewhere and decides our futures. I thought we could create something democratically, and help these narratives reach some kind of fruition.”

Picking up the threads, Richa, who was most recently seen in ‘Fukrey 3’, said: “I definitely wanted more creative control over things that I was doing. And I wanted to lessen the gap between what I was watching and what I was acting in.”

The actress concluded by saying: “Sometimes what you watch, those are not the parts that come to you, and sometimes those are not the projects being made in the industry. I don’t know how successful we will be in the long term, because it has to be a sustainable business at the end of the day. But we will do our best to marry both things (acting and producing).”

On the personal front, Ali and Richa are expecting their first child together. And on the work front, Richa will soon be seen in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s debut web-series ‘Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar’.