BENGALURU: Tamil film, Visaranai became the official Indian entry in the Oscars 2016. However to the disappointment of many, news soon came that it had fallen out of the race. The film’s director, Vetrimaran however is not disheartened and wants to go on making movies that he believes in. “For me making a movie is not about pushing myself. I make movies only when I am very comfortable,” he says.
Highlighting this spontaneity is the way he made the movie, he says, “Visaranai surprised me a lot. I did not have a script. The first half of the movie was based on a novel. In the second half we just started shooting and went about with what we thought was right. It was an organic and intuitive process. It’s hard to rationalise that,” he adds. Vetrimaran was at the BIFFES on Sunday interacting with film buffs about his film and his ideas about film making.
His previous two films, Polladhavan (2007) and Aadukulam (2011) have won many awards and laurels. However according to him the process of making Visaranai started with his first film itself. “To make a movie like Visaranai, one has to make two films like my previous ones,” he says. Based on a novel, Lock Up written by M Chandrakumar, Visaranai deals with the subject of police brutality and corruption and films such as these according to Vetrimaran are a “means to incite people and reform existing system.”
Adapting a novel to a film according to him is always a challenge and he chose to take the essence of the novel. “In such cases what we can only do is to take the classical qualities of such works and try and reinvent it for a movie.” Vetrimaran and his team of technicians did not take any pay for making the movie and worked purely on faith and intuition.
The shooting and filmaking of Visaranai took a lot of psychological toll on actors and other members of the film crew since it dealt with a very sensitive subject. “A number of actors like Dinesh (lead) have told me that they were psychologically affected by the movie. Dinesh himself used to have nightmares even after nine months since the movie was finished,” says Vetrimaran.
While there is a general argument for critical and art cinema to be in conflict with commercial cinema, Vetrimaran thinks that all these are ambiguous terms. “When you make a movie, one needs to have a clear understanding about the market and the kind of audience one is catering to,” he says.