In a time when intimacy on screen is endlessly dissected, politicised and often reduced to clickbait, filmmaker Rangita Pritish Nandy is refreshingly clear about intent, authorship and responsibility. Speaking about Four More Shots Please! and the conversations around sex, agency and gaze, Rangita frames intimacy not as provocation, but as storytelling.

For her, the question isn’t whether intimacy should exist on screen, but why it exists at all. Cutting straight to the heart of the matter, in an exclusive chat with India Today, Nandy shares that it's important that intimacy is not for excitement or eyeballs. "It has to be organic. Everything has to feel like it's there because it's taking something forward, not just for titillation. I think that because we knew right up, if you're talking about four women, who live and love, there's bound to be a certain amount of intimacy."

That philosophy becomes even more crucial when the story is told through the eyes of women protagonists, where agency needs to be redefined. “Normally, intimacy you’ve seen on screen has been driven by the man. Here, the whole point was that these four women have agency over their own intimacy. They take charge. Whether that means they want to be on top or underneath, that’s entirely what they’re feeling like on that particular day,” she says, adding that the approach was to neither sanitise female sexuality nor sensationalise it.

For Rangita, what happens behind the camera is just as important as what makes it to the screen. Explaining how safety, consent and authenticity are inseparable from good storytelling, she says, “It has to feel safe for the actors doing it. That is critical for us, that nothing happens that makes them feel unsafe at any point. Because otherwise, what’s the point of us being here behind the scenes?”

Four More Shots Please! was also among the early Indian shows to work with intimacy coordinators -- something Rangita describes as part of a learning curve rather than a fixed rulebook. “I know we didn’t have one in season one. From season two, we did,” she says, adding how the conversation around intimacy coordinators has evolved since then. At first, actors were saying, ‘I want an intimacy coordinator.’ Now the irony is, I have actors pushing back and saying, ‘I know what I’m doing. I don’t need another person to tell me,’” she says.

However, Rangita doesn’t see this as a conflict but rather growth, as she says, “That’s also fine. It’s a journey.”

As the show returns in a vastly different digital climate, one where social media outrage can erupt over anything a woman does, Rangita remains unfazed. Asked how the new season will land amid constant online noise, she sounds optimistic, “The social media positive noise is going to be phenomenal. It’s not going to be political. It’s just going to be a generation accepting that this represents them absolutely smack on right, and it fits. That’s it.”