Riz Ahmed

And actually, that was the opposite of how we wanted it to feel.

And it really took us meeting Anil Kharia, the director.

It was after I collaborated with him on the short film, The Long Goodbye, for which he won an Oscar, that I was like, oh, I think we know how to do this.

We need a director who's worked a lot in rap music videos.

We need a director who has actually...

can render poetry in a very raw way and give us raw action in a very poetic way.

And that's what he did in that short film.

And that's what he does in his films.

And we connected and we had a long conversation about how this has to feel like music, you know?

Yeah, I don't think it's about suicide at all.

It's about...

fighting back against oppression, even if you know that you will lose everything, possibly even your life.

It's actually, it's very clear in black and white in the text, the active verb here is about taking, it's about to take up arms.

You know, what he's saying is there's two choices.

You can carry on being

And it's very interesting.

He says, be not living, just be.

You can exist and you can exist and just suffer all the oppression and all the unfairness and all the injustice of the world and all the insults that life throws at you.

Or you can fight back.

But fighting back might mean you will not no longer be.