MUMBAI: Well, we‘ve all seen Piyush Pandey and Agnello Dias going on stage and being acclaimed as creative geniuses. Now, we will get to see them try their hand at histrionics on the big screen. Courtesy good friend and filmmaker Shoojit Sircar - who made Ayushman Khurana a household name through Vicky Donor.

His current project Madras Café is slated to feature the Taproot India co-founder & chief creative officer Aggie (as he is called by advertising colleagues) and the south Asia Ogilvy & Mather India executive chairman & creative director Piyush Pandey.

For Piyush getting on screen is nothing new; having featured in TVCs and in ads. But it is a first for creativity‘s brainchild, Aggie who decided to shy away from a conversation with indiantelevision.com. 

Says Shoojit Sircar: "We always try to tell different stories and try our hands at different genres. I have previously too tried to get Piyush Pandey as a cast member and this time we were looking for someone who could play the role of a senior bureaucrat. I think the way Piyush has acted in the movie, people might be all the more keen on casting him. As regards Agnello Dais, he too is a good friend. We got stuck while casting when we had to cast a Sri Lankan face to play the role of a minister. I think I found that in him!"

Piyush Pandey, on the other hand, states that he has no inclination toward acting in movies and that he chose to do so out of goodwill and friendship, "I think Madras Café is a very meaningful and interesting film. For me to act in a movie, I feel Madras Café is a wonderful project to be associated with. Shoojit is a dear friend to me and I acted because he thought that he could get the factor he wanted out of me!" he says.

The film is rumored to be filmed on the lines of Hollywood films like Argo and the Body of Lies. Sircar claims to have taken the subject from the 90s era in Sri Lanka. The movie is about a RAW agent- John Abraham - who is in a war-like situation and gets into a covert operation to finally save his country.

To market a movie to attract the attention of cinema going audiences requires the movie to be intriguing, exciting, informative and entertaining. Viacom18 Motion Pictures marketing & operations head Rudrarup Datta, Head says: "The weight of the movie is based not on the journey of Captain Vikram Singh doing intelligence work but on what the world is like while being in situations in an intelligence job. It is not like the normal James Bond movie; it‘s going to be more real. And we are also looking at this film getting acclaim internationally."

Meanwhile, the first official trailer (which was released on 12 July) has been making waves on YouTube, having got close to 195,000 views at the time of writing. And the team at Viacom18 put in a lot of promotional effort to get the numbers going. For instance, before its official release, Vaicom 18 drew up a campaign where viewers had to crack a code to watch the 20 second trailer.