Debutant director Janardhan Chikkanna is doing the sound mixing for his upcoming release Gultoo, slated for release next week. “We work better tensed, in the eleventh hour. Our Indian mentality is that, until the deadline nears, we tend to relax," he saying laughing, and adds, "On a serious note, everything is done to priority." The first-time director has piqued people’s interest with the movie title Gultoo, the teaser and recently released trailer.
He says that he will reveal the intent behind the title, but two days before the release. About the movie’s storyline, Janardhan says, that it has a lot to do with coding and encryption."Hacking, encryption and decryption are key words in the online world, and the movie deals with this amply in its first half and climax. The title Gultoo is an encrypted string, the meaning of which I will reveal soon, through a campaign," says the director, who is an Information Science graduate and and his course influenced the subject of his first film.
"This subject has not been dealt with in Kannada. This stands this movie out from the crowd, though I didn’t pick this subject to blindly do anything 'out-of-the-box', to be noticed. I genuinely felt that this nobody has dealt with this story, which is so relevant to our times. I found it inspiring," says Janardhan, who has also written the script. This is a crime thriller, but deals with a unique crime. "I realised movies in this genre generally deal with murder or adapt a real-life incident, and these have been done to death. But Indians are heavily influenced by the west, and digital crime is so common these days… I thought I should throw light on individual privacy and our vulnerability online,” he says.
The director has come out with different posters too, which go well with the title and subject of Gultoo. "I made a producer-pitch trailer, in which every actor wore glasses with round frames, and this became a highlight,” he says. Interestingly, Janardhan had the actors in place and then found a producer. Except for Rangayana Raghu and Pawan Kumar, all actors including Avinash, newcomer Naveen Shankar playing the lead and Sonu Gowda, Dhanu came on board before the movie got a producer. “They were quite enthused with the subject and believed in the content. This helped me come up with a good product," he says with confidence. Gultoo has music by Amit Anand and cinematography by Shanthi Sagar