Four better or worse

Four better or worse


By Michael Pickard
October 25, 2024

IN FOCUS

Romantic drama Four Years Later travels between Australia and India to tell the story of a married couple facing up to a long-distance relationship. Creator Mithila Gupta and lead director Mohini Herse discuss their partnership on this groundbreaking series.

At home in the Indian city of Jaipur, screenwriter Mithila Gupta grew up on the fairytale romances portrayed in countless Bollywood movies. But when it came to writing her own romantic drama, she wanted to tell a “real and grounded” story that better reflected reality.

Now living in Sydney, Australia, she was particularly interested in the immigrant experience and how two people can reconnect with each other after being separated for an extended period of time.

“I’ve grown up watching Bollywood and I love it. No shade on Bollywood – it’s a huge inspiration – but the films I grew up on painted love in a certain way, and altered what I expected of reality, which ended up being disappointing at times,” Gupta tells DQ. “So I’ve always wanted to tell a real love story, a story of a couple as immigrants, and to just go into that human experience.”

That story is told in Four Years Later, an eight-part series set between India and Australia that follows the marriage and subsequent separation of Sridevi (Bombay Begum’s Shahana Goswami) and Yash (24: India star Akshay Ajit Singh), who must spend time apart immediately after their arranged marriage when Yash lands a highly coveted medical traineeship in Sydney.

Told through dual perspectives, the series explores themes of love, intimacy, familial duty and belonging as it uncovers the complexities of Yash and Sridevi’s relationship both in the present, once they are reunited, and in flashbacks that detail the challenges they faced while apart.

Shahana Goswami and Akshay Ajit Singh star as Sridevi and Yash

“Our characters have two contrasting experiences of home and two very contrasting experiences of the new land. Ultimately, that’s what challenges their relationship the most,” showrunner Gupta (Five Bedrooms, Bump) explains. “It’s about seeing two people and how they find their belonging. They get pulled in two opposite directions but always fight to stay together.”

With two timelines and two perspectives set across two countries, Four Years Later could have been a complicated proposition. Gupta admits there is “absolutely no structure” to the series, but says her one rule when writing it was to follow the emotion. That’s how she found the right moments to jump back into the past or switch between Sridevi and Yash in the present, where the majority of the series is set. “So we’ve followed the emotion and we’ve found even in the edit that, ‘Oh, actually, the episode shouldn’t open there. Let’s move that here,’ which as a writer has been so interesting because you think once you’ve locked your script, you’re done,” she says. “But it’s been so rewarding to actually play with the structure.

“In the writers room, we were always like, ‘I just need to see this,’ so we threw back when we needed to. It’s a little bit experimental in that regard, and I’m interested to see how it works for audiences. We think it’s quite easy to follow because India and Sydney are such different places, and the timelines are attached to place. Just sit down and go on the journey. You’re not really sure where you’re going to go.”

Produced by Australia’s Easy Tiger (Colin from Accounts, The Twelve) with the support of Indian production company Suitable Pictures, the show begins as Sridevi arrives in Sydney expecting a fantasy reunion with the husband she adores. But after leaving bustling Jaipur, she finds all is not as she had hoped. However, while Yash has struggled to fit into his new homeland, Sridevi begins to thrive, shaking off her identity as a dutiful housewife and discovering a new world of freedom and independence.

Discovering that a lot has happened to their spouse in those intervening years, they each uncover a web of lies and false promises that threaten the undeniable passion and devotion they have for one another.

Yash has to move to Australia straight after he and Sridevi tie the knot in India

Playing out in both Hindi and English, the show moves between Jaipur, Mumbai and Sydney and features a supporting cast including Kate Box (Deadloch), Taj Aldeeb (The Fall), Roy Joseph (Five Bedrooms) and Luke Arnold (Scrublands).

To make the series, Gupta partnered with lead director Mohini Herse (Appetite), who shot episodes one, two, four and eight and split her time between Australia and India, where the majority of the scenes in her episodes are set. As well as being drawn to the themes at the heart of Gupta’s story, Herse was intrigued by the challenge of being an Australian director working in India with an Indian crew on a series that uniquely bonds the two countries together.

“That was really what was quite exciting about the show, to find our tone in India, bring it back to Australia and find this visual style that can seamlessly interact between two places, which on the page are seemingly very different, but then anchor it with two characters and this universal story that we can all resonate with,” Herse says. “So it was a very exciting project for me and it’s been really rewarding.

“It’s also challenging because it’s a drama just about two people, so there’s nowhere to hide either. You really have to focus on what makes these two people special and the stakes within such an intense relationship as well.”

In terms of direction, Herse wanted to lean into ideas of memory and senses, which allowed her to move between time and place in the story – shifts that are triggered by a smell, touch, taste or a sound that resonates with the characters in some way. But memory, and its unreliability, is also used to mislead viewers. “That’s something really great that Mithila has done because, in the episode, you think it’s going to go one way because we’ve been shown a memory, and maybe it goes the other way because that person actually didn’t interpret the memory in the same way,” she says. “That’s a really interesting perspective that the show plays with between the two characters.”

The show’s stars pose with creator Mithila Gupta

Early on in development, Four Years Later was actually a four-part series, which naturally gave the story more of a thriller feel. “But we were all like, ‘We just want to tell a love story,’ and it was more about the perception of the four years [the main characters spend] apart,” Gupta says. “So we don’t play events from two perspectives but we do play with their interpretation of what that time apart was like, what they kept from each other and why.”

In the writers room, Gupta was joined by Nicole Reddy and S Shakthidharan, both of whom also have South Asian heritage. With such a high-concept series, their biggest challenge proved to be fitting all of their ideas into the cumulative four-hour running time, from Srivdevi and Yash’s individual takes on the immigrant experience to his career ambitions and her search for a place in the world. However, the writing team quickly decided that if a story didn’t affect the central relationship, it didn’t have a place in the show.

“We used to have a lot more medical plot,” Gupta says. “In the writers room, you get scared you won’t have enough plot for the propulsion of the story. It was hard at the time, but it was so rewarding to just pull out anything that didn’t affect that relationship.”

On set in Sydney and Jaipur, Herse sought to bring a “local” perspective to the series, rather than focusing on globally recognisable elements like Australia’s Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Great Barrier Reef, or the iconic temples, colours, sights and sounds readily associated with India on screen. That’s not to say that familiar locations in Jaipur and Sydney don’t feature at all, but the ambition was always to normalise them in the way that someone who walks past the Sydney Opera House every day might not see it in the same way as someone visiting the city for the first time.

“I wanted to really strip it back. If someone’s grown up in a place, what makes it a place for them? What does home look like for them? And then what does a different place look like when you don’t feel at home in it?” the director says. “We wanted to be in the spaces where our characters are existing and where they’re living their life. I wanted to show how it feels to be home.”

Mohini Herse (centre) is lead director on the eight-part drama

When it came to shooting, the two locations couldn’t have been more different. “The crew was three times larger in India, and that was a little bit overwhelming to begin with,” Herse says. “But at the same time, India has such a thriving film and television industry. In terms of creativity, from the gaffer to the grip to the art department to the runner, everyone was so excited to talk to Mithila and myself about the story.

“In a bizarre way, everyone had a way to connect to it, whether it was a son going to Australia and having a hard time, or if they’d known someone who did have a family member or friend who was split apart. Everyone had a way in to the story, and it meant everyone was really excited to collaborate and represent this story in an authentic way.”

Across the series, costume designers, production designers and other department heads in India collaborated with their Australian counterparts to ensure elements of each location were woven through the whole show. Herse also worked closely with fellow director Fadia Abboud (House of Gods, Five Bedrooms) to ensure the Indian shoot complemented the way scenes in Australia were shot.

“There was a lot going on in terms of everyone feeling connected and understanding the two worlds,” Herse says. “But it was weird doing 16-hour days in India and then coming to Australia and having a very reduced crew and shooting just in an apartment. Or going to a hospital and just being like, ‘Are we in the same show? Is this a medical drama?’ But at the end of the day, as soon as you put Shahana and Akshay in front of the camera, it’s the same show and they just carry so much of that. They were fantastic.”

On set, Goswami and Singh faced shooting out of sequence, as scenes would be filmed by location, meaning in the first couple of days they recorded moments from both episode one and episode eight. Gupta and Herse both spent time in rehearsal with the stars, talking through the characters and how they should lean into their cultures and experiences.

“They were so their characters,” Gupta says, “Originally Sridevi was a lot younger, and Shahana was just like, ‘Wow, this is such a relatable woman. She’s so strong and powerful, but why does she have to start as a more traditional version of an Indian bride?’ So we aged the character up, which raised the stakes of the whole story, especially around [questions of] starting a family. We made her much more bolshie from the top, which actually changed her entire arc.”

Four Years Later debuted on Australia’s SBS at the start of this month

That meant Sridevi’s story became less coming-of-age and more about her finding her place in the world, both while Yash is away in Australia and then when they reunite.

“Shahana really brought Sridevi to life, and then Akshay, when we were testing him for Yash, he said things and I was writing them down because I was like, ‘That’s what Yash would say,” Gupta continues. “It was so uncanny. He related to the character in so many ways. We went through it all together a lot in rehearsals in India, and then after that they just took it. They understood the heart of the story and where they were in that story, even though we jumped around.”

Distributed internationally by ITV Studios, Four Years Later also employed intimacy coordinators in India and Australia to work with Herse and Abboud on the show, from choreographing Sridevi and Yash’s first kiss to numerous “steamy scenes” – as Herse describes them – through the series.

“The intimacy was such a huge part of it too,” Gupta says. “In the very early pitch, it was [Sally Rooney adaptation] Normal People, but with brown people, and then people would be like, ‘Oh, really like Normal People?’ And it’s like, ‘Yeah, we invented the Karma Sutra. We want to see these characters do a real love story and see how their intimacy changes.’ That’s been so rewarding. To see it actually pushing the boundaries as well, even beyond expectation, has been so awesome.”

Herse adds: “Shahana’s had a big career, so the fact that this was her first time [with an intimacy coordinator], it was my first time, it was Mithila’s, and to start that conversation around intimacy practices and to find it together, it was so fun. It just felt right.”

Now reflecting on making Four Years Later, which debuted on SBS on October 2, Gupta calls it a miracle. “From conception and getting it up to us actually shooting in India and Australia and the beautiful people who have been involved, it’s absolutely a miracle,” she says. “I’m so proud of it, and I’m really excited for audiences to watch something and relate to it across the board. We’re so excited to showcase these characters that we don’t often get to see on our screens. But more than that, it’s a love story.”

The project has also been life-changing for Herse, who was an emerging director in Australia and has now clocked up more shooting hours in India than in Oz. She has also since landed a six-month placement with Bad Sisters prodco Merman in London. “I was like, ‘I guess I’m an Indian director now, guys,’” she jokes.

“There was such a beautiful vibe on this set, in both countries, and I’m really excited for everyone to watch it and to see that, because when you shoot something and you feel it on set, it does translate to screen. We had some really magical moments, so I’m excited for everyone to share that with us.”

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