Amazon’s spy thriller Honey Bunny throws out the rule book
When the streaming studio Amazon asked Anthony and Joe Russo, the creators of its multi-series “spyverse” Citadel, to expand their story, they did not reach sideways into the headlines or traditional spy tropes like suits, gadgets and the Cold War.
Instead, they collaborated with filmmakers Raj Nidimoru and Krishna Dasarakothapalli – known professionally as Raj & DK – and sent their story back to India in the 1990s.
Varun Dhawan as Agent Bunny in Citadel: Honey Bunny.Credit: Prime Video
“We saw how they were heading for a very futuristic, highly advanced, high-tech and really cool series, and an entire team of brilliant creative minds sitting and devising these things,” Raj says. “We instinctively felt, what if we do a polar opposite of it? What if we completely go organic, earthy, grounded, punches and good old revolvers?
“We thought we could pack a punch even without the tech, or just go low-tech and have pagers and palm pilots ... so suddenly there was a smile on our faces that if this could work, if they buy into this, then we can do something, we can add a new flavour to the universe. And they immediately said go for it.”
Citadel is a near-future high-tech (somewhat) conventional spy thriller, starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra as Citadel agents Mason Kane and Nadia Sinh. Stanley Tucci plays Bernard Orlick, their former boss and gadget man. It’s hardly Get Smart, but standing in for Control and KAOS, you have Citadel and Manticore.
Citadel: Honey Bunny is a world away, technologically and culturally – almost. Set several decades before Citadel, it is the story of a stuntman and actress, played by Varun Dhawan and Samantha Ruth Prabhu, respectively, who team up and become agents Honey and Bunny. The twist in the tale? Honey’s daughter Nadia will, in a few decades time, grow up to be agent Nadia Sinh.
Samantha Ruth Prabhu as Agent Honey with Kashvi Majmundar as young Nadia Sinh in Citadel: Honey Bunny.Credit: Prime Video
And while this is a spy series, Honey Bunny owes more to its Indian heritage, and India’s Bollywood film culture, than it does to anything in conventional western espionage cinema. It has a cadence and rhythm which is breathtakingly unique. And the story pivots on properly unpredictable turns.
“I know people are used to Bollywood being a certain type like song and dance and musicals and stuff like that, and there are great filmmakers in that genre of films. We’ve been a bit more mixed, I guess,” Raj says.
“A bit of India, a bit of America, like American independent filmmaking and even our good old Telugu films, the local films that we grew up on.” Telugu – sometimes called “Tollywood” – is a genre of Indian cinema made in the Telugu language, which is spoken in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and leans into the action and special-effects genre.
“All these are mishmashes in our heads, and so every time we do something, we try to do a genre mix or something we take a genre and then push it,” Raj says. “We take a spy genre and slightly try to disrupt it. That’s what our [creative] inheritance is.”
Kashvi Majmundar as young Nadia Sinh in Citadel: Honey Bunny.Credit: Prime Video
DK believes the most striking thing about Honey Bunny is that Indian film and television have not, historically, leaned into genre. “We start blending genres and organic, slice-of-life humour seems to creep in into everything we do, and we love doing that,” DK says. “No matter how serious it is, how serious the mission is, how serious the premise is, somewhere there is some scope for levity.”
Honey Bunny, the third chapter of the Citadel franchise, lands just after Amazon delivered the second, Diana, a series set closer to the same time period as the main Citadel program, and set in Italy. Though they come creatively from opposite sides of the world, the two Citadel spin-offs share a heightened sense of cinematic art. Perhaps Italy and India are not so different, artistically.
“I do see an amalgam of various filmmaking styles, especially when I saw Diana, I could see the Italian flavour in it, and when I look back at American Citadel, I could see those stylised elements in that,” Raj says. “We are in a world where we are influencing each other and picking things from each other.”
Honey Bunny is also – critically – the story of a little girl coming into her own power. While Honey and Bunny dominate much of the high-kicking spy action, the scenes with young Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar) seem to weigh a little heavily with the audience’s knowledge that she has a pivotal part to play in the future Citadel story.
Varun Dhawan as Agent Bunny dominates the high-kicking spy action in Citadel: Honey Bunny.Credit: Prime Video
“That was by design,” DK says. “This has gone through multiple, multiple drafts, and perhaps the earlier drafts were heavy on the plot and the espionage part of it, and slowly we started understanding that this needs to be a drama about this family unit, mother, father and child. Destroying the world, or saving the world, still forms the backdrop, but the core emotion in it is, I want this family to survive.”
The other specific quality which sets Honey Bunny apart from the wider Citadel story, and perhaps the espionage genre generally, is that Raj and DK specialise in low-budget filmmaking. Which is not to imply that the series looks cheap – quite the opposite – but that the series seems to enjoy stepping into physical locations and real-world props, and not too much on expensive add-ons such as special effects.
“We started off as independent filmmakers, and we taught ourselves filmmaking, which is basically put your own money in, pick up the camera, shoot, edit, everything,” Raj says. “We taught ourselves writing, directing, shooting, editing, posters, whatever you want. That’s our core.
“Every movie we make, I think we go back to those roots. Even if it’s layered with a lot of budget sometimes, or maybe camouflaged with beautiful production values, at the heart of it, we are looking at it like an independent film that we create with our hands and that pushes us to invent a lot of things.”
Honey Bunny premieres on Prime Video on Thursday, November 7.
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