CHENNAI: Any Tamil movie producer would be thrilled to bits when their movie is important enough to have an ‘LA (Los Angeles) premiere’. But for Aascar Ravichandran, the premiere that’s really piqued his curiosity is the one that will take place in Lahore, Pakistan, on Thursday.
“I was extremely surprised when I got a call one and a half months ago from a Pak distributor. He said that they wanted to screen the film there after having seen the rushes and trailer, so I thought ‘why not’,” he told Express, on the eve of I’s Tamil release for the long Pongal weekend.
Despite several cash crunch issues and other problems in the run up to its release, Ravichandran duly followed through and had the digital prints sent to Pakistan on Monday.
“There are around 14-15 theatres that will be screening the Hindi version from Thursday, which is when it releases across the rest of India. I am very interested in knowing how this film will do there because I believe it’s the first time a film from Tamil Nadu is releasing in Pakistan, on the same day as it does everywhere else,” exclaimed the man who also produced the Shankar-Vikram duo’s previous outing Anniyan. This will be the first major Indian release in Pakistan, after Aamir Khan’s PK notched up impressive box-office numbers. He said he anticipated no ‘problem’ as there was nothing religiously controversial in film.
Releasing in over 50 countries worldwide, Ravichandran said that he was nothing short of stymied when he received an enquiry from a group of students in Ukraine. “They wanted to buy and screen the film because of its technical brilliance. More than the other foreign markets, these enquiries really made me understand just how much expectations have been raised for I,” he said. Incidentally, a dubbed Chinese version is almost complete and will be released at a film fest in Beijing in February. “We have been flooded with queries for dubbed versions in other languages, but we are waiting to see the response that these versions have,” he remarked.
With a rumoured `150 crore investment over the film’s three-year production period, there’s a lot riding on the film’s success. “I am not worried. Whether it runs or not is in the hands of the people,” he concluded with tartness.