Ismail Umar Khan on ZEE5’s film ‘One Stop for Love’: A lot of people demotivated me; I showed my passion and efforts!

ZEE5’s recently launched film ‘One Stop for Love’ is a light hearted Rom-Com which focuses on the lifestyle of today's generation, where abuses are used as conjunction. The film stars Shweta Khandhuri as Sanjana, Gulfam Khan Hussain as Duggu Aunty, Sanjay Thakker as Pritam, Shikha Singh as Kamna, Richa Sinha as Roops and Bhavya A Shinde as Dharam. 

It revolves around the story of Sanjana who is a young, single, hot and amazingly talented writer working as a freelancer for a web series, specialised in writing adult content. Surprisingly she is still virgin and the reason behind that is she is a prisoner of the virtual world. At a house party her close friend Kamna provokes Sanjana for eyeing her boyfriend, Sanjana in a drunken state ends up booking a Gigolo online. Next morning he is at her door and Sanjana is in a fix to let him in or out.

We got in touch with Ismail Umar Khan who is the producer, director as well as the writer of the project and Supriya Ismail Khan who has produced the film. The duo talked to us about their experience working for the series, what compelled them about the concept and much more. Have a look: 

Talking about the series, Ismail Umar Khan said, “I thought of making a character who is so away from real life, she is away from the world and even her friends are online friends. She doesn’t go anywhere as she is a writer by profession, so all her work is done at her own home."

We asked him how different was the experience shooting for web then TV, to which he said, “See, as this is the concept of the series, I have written the  show and even the dialogues have been written by me. A lot of people demotivated me saying that don’t make this, where will you sell it. But see, I have done a lot of work in Television, now mostly the film directors are doing web shows. They prefer film directors more as you see, only a few people who have great contacts, they get it easily. For us, it gets a little difficult at times.” He added, “I felt that I want to make it on my own, put my own money in it and see who the artists that are available would like to do this with me. So I thought about that and planned it, then the casting was done. But when it came to making the show, it took such a long time that people got busy, they got other work commitments and I made it because I felt that no, I have to make it. It’s a cute story, it's a good culmination, bold story and it is different. Even if the story is bold, I have made it very decently. The concept is bold, there are abuses but it is made decently.”

He added, “Film is made by passion and efforts and one should never give up. I showed my passion and efforts which is why I could make this film. But I made it and took it to a platform like ZEE5 and that’s my achievement.”

Talking about their experience shooting with the entire team and the cast, they mentioned:

Ismail- It was fun. I took their rehearsal before the film went on floors. I will talk about Shweta Khandhuri, she has perfectly adapted the character of Sanjana. She performed the way I wanted to, she has done full justice to the character. I don’t think anyone could have done a better job than her.

Supriya- Amazing. I have only worked with Gulfam, she’s a dear friend of mine. Apart from this, everybody was new to me but they are very real to their characters. The entire crew, actors, technicians, everybody were working as if it’s their own film and I had amazing support as a first time producer for a film. I think every producer should have such a great team to work with, only then you can think bigger and larger than life. 

Supriya Ismail Khan spoke about her experience working as a first time producer for a film. She shared, “As a producer for me, it is nothing new that I have done because I have been working as a creative and as a head of operation. But what happens is that when you work for somebody else you know, a lot of things are not under your control. Now, with your own production house, you make sure, everything is under your control. And you don’t make those silly mistakes which you normally make when you have too many people to communicate and you end up doing it. So the best thing is that everything was under my control, in a given timeI finished off the project. I completed the project in less budget and thankfully I had a good platform to release it also.”

We asked her what’s the one thing which compelled her about this concept. She shared, “See initially I was not really a part of this entire project. But later when I saw Ismail and his team and even Ismail was busy with other shows, he was doing Ikyawann. In the middle, he was also working on the script and he told me that we are doing this, initially we thought that we can do it for youtube or something. But when I saw the enthusiasm and saw that the entire team was working really hard, I thought that let’s make it big, let’s go out and shoot and we’ll see how the entire project comes out. So I have also supervised the entire edit of the film, so it’s come out very good. We didn’t think that it would turn out to be this great but after completing the film, I thought that it’s a film so it should have a title track also. So then I went to the Lata Mangeshkar studio and recorded the title track for this. It’s an amazing title track.”