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"When you are co-writing a film script, it’s tough to remember who contributed that one big, great idea. One suggests something, sometimes the other one shoots it down and sometimes builds on it,” says Ayesha DeVitre Dhillon, who along with director Shakun Batra has written the script for the Hindi movie Kapoor & Sons (since 1921) released worldwide on March 18 of this year. Made under the banners of Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions and Fox Star Studios, the film won approbation from critics specifically for the screenplay. NDTV said the "screenplay by Devitre Dhillon and Batra probes aspects of human nature that are rarely touched upon in more facile Bollywood fare.” Calling the story the star of the movie, The Times of India said that the movie showcases "an entirely real family, full of uncomfortable secrets, awkward jealousies and sharp pain, where brothers steal, parents cheat, siblings suspect and ‘perfect bachchas’ (children) don’t have perfect love lives.”  According to the Hindustan Times, "The writers of the film ... have done a fabulous job in providing every major character a chance to flourish.”
According to DeVitre Dhillon, the film, which has a stellar cast of veterans like Rishi Kapoor, Ratna Pathak-Shah, Rajat Kapoor and relative newcomers like Sidharth Malhotra, Fawad Khan and Alia Bhatt, worked because it was not about a perfect family. In conversation with Parsiana, she states, "We both believe no family is perfect” and that people connected with the film and "felt it was real because they saw glimpses of themselves and their family and friends” in the film. 

 

 

 

 

 

 
The writer denies she wove in her personal experiences with writing into the characters played by Khan and Malhotra who are script writers too! "That would have been too easy.” She lets on that once they saw the film on the edit table, they "felt a lot more confident of our product.” The scriptwriters thought the film should work with a very urban audience. "We were pleasantly surprised when the film released that it had a more universal appeal,” she tells us. The movie was made on a budget of Rs 350 million (US $ 5.2 million) and raked in over Rs 1.51 billion (US $ 22 million) worldwide, according to trade reports.
Stating that she was present during the making of the film, as she was doing the hair-styling as well ("for all the characters in the film, including the minor ones, except for Sidharth Malhotra’s, who has his own stylist”), the scriptwriter cum stylist states that being on set allows one to "watch a scene being acted out” and "if we feel it isn’t working we have the liberty of improving it.” Giving an example from Kapoor & Sons, she states that Boobly, the slightly vacuous bodybuilder’s character, was "written on set after he said his first line.” Both co-writers loved the way he emoted and added him to various other scenes where he originally wasn’t. "I love being attached to a film till it is released,” says this hands-on writer.
Believers in the adage that ‘life is unpredictable,’ the writer duo delivered a twist in the tale as Kapoor & Sons nears its end. While audiences may have expected the irascible senior citizen played by Rishi Kapoor to kick the bucket, and "in our initial drafts we had bumped him off,” one day while writing "I thought it might be nice to have an unexpected ending,” she states. The duo wove a surprise towards the end of the film and "it worked.” 

 

 

 

 

The writer began her career as a stylist with Nalini and Yasmin, the styling duo in Bombay. "I still do hair; that is where the money is,” she says, but admits she is more passionate about writing currently. DeVitre Dhillon calls herself a "hairstylist who stumbled upon writing eight years ago” when she met Batra while working on styling hair for her first film Jaane tu... ya jane na (Whether you know or not) which was produced by mega star, director and producer Aamir Khan with Batra as assistant director. "He and I got along like a house on fire,” she says and "exchanged stories and life experiences every second we were on set.” Philosophizing that the truth about the film industry is that if you want to be a director you need to have a script, she reminisces that Batra, with directorial aspirations "had neither the money nor the connections to buy a ready script” though he had already signed up with Dharma Productions for a three-film deal. That’s when he turned to DeVitre Dhillon to co-write with him for his first directorial venture Ek main aur ek tu (You and me). That movie was released in 2012. 
About the early years, DeVitre Dhillon recalls that having no formal training in scriptwriting, they were "like two lost children.” They watched loads of films, downloaded screenplays of films they loved and read them over and over again "to understand structure.” Then they "took the plunge and wrote some horrid initial drafts,” she admits frankly. That’s when "Shakun and I decided to become a writing team,”stresses the 33-year-old.
Describing the process of scriptwriting, DeVitre Dhillon says that initially she and Batra "spend days just talking … once we see the film in our heads, we turn to a white board and start jotting down a screenplay. We write our ideas and scenes in a book initially and only once we have that in place do we open a final draft on our laptops.”
Emphasizing that she comes from a very different family than the fictional Kapoors of the film, DeVitre Dhillon an alumna of Bombay Scottish School and St Xavier’s College states that "my family is a big, happy, crazy Parsi family.” Parents, Zarina, a homemaker and Homi who has a made a career in the shipping industry have "always been supportive of every choice I’ve ever made professionally and personally.” Married to childhood sweetheart Ajit Dhillon, a wealth manager for a finance company, the couple have a one-and-a-half-year-old son, Ahaan, "who keeps me busier than my writing does.” She is "uncomfortable” talking about her religious beliefs as she "considers it to be a very personal issue,” but informs that she is a practising Zoroastrian.
"No amount of courses in writing help,” is what she has to say to aspiring writers. Formal inputs in writing makes you "too structured;” you tend to think within the box, says this writer who is already collaborating with Batra on the script for his next film.