Deepak Thimmaiah, a popular TV anchor has chosen a music album Neene Bari Neene to design his directorial debut. The film is produced by Ashok Khenny.
"The album was released in 2009 and has now been converted into a film soundtrack. Normally in Karnataka, album songs don't do that well unless they are included in a movie. Neene...did not do so well and we wanted the songs to reach out to as many people as possible. So, we decided to make a movie where I wove the story around the songs and that is how the film was conceived," he explains.
According to Deepak, the adaptation of an album into a movie score is a one-of-its-kind experiment in recent times and an earlier attempt to do the same was made by the makers of Mysooru Mallige.
However, it was a challenge for Deepak to tell a story, using independent songs as triggers.Â
"We had to actually find a solution to fix the tone of the songs. The original album had about nine songs and we chopped two songs and added one song by Shreya Ghosal. All the songs are written by Jayanth Kaikini, except for one song by Shreya that is written by Vinayak Bhat," says Deepak, who wanted to direct a film for the longest time.
"I term this film as a romantic musical with a very simple story that will touch everybody's heart. The screenplay is by Vinayak Bhat," he says. "Everybody makes movies but I wanted a creative challenge. So I picked up this album as a thread around which my vision will unspool," he adds. Now that the product is ready and final polishing is going on, Deepak opines that his debut is certainly an 'above average' film.
"The film is very simple, light and beautiful to watch because we have paid a lot of attention to visuals. It was an extremely good experience with audio visuals. The credit goes to technicians and they have done a fantastic job. However, it is a long film...over two hours and 40 minutes. Even then, I am sure that people will not get bored. We have tweaked the scenes and they are very short. We shot for a total of 92 days because we had eight songs and had to reshoot a few songs and scenes. That's one of the reasons, we wanted to new actors because, I wanted full commitment from them," he says.
With cinema changing a lot in recent years, was Deepak able to make his debut trendy? He answers, "I am proud to say that Neene... is about women. It is about family and life but, most importantly about two girls. We have actually not spoken about a man speaking about women's life but how a women thinks about herself. Our film doesn't worship the hero. It is all about the narrative and how it is told."
He adds, "Honestly, I don't have patience to watch any film and that's why I watch very few movies. I wanted to make a film that I could watch at least 10 to 12 times without getting bored. In the same way, I want the audience to miss the on-screen characters when they walk out of the theatres. Finally, I wanted to make a simple film. I didn't want to overdo the philosophical bits. I wanted to call the film a 'Love story without love'. But settled with the album's name."
He also says that his anchoring skills have helped him to adjust with sync, sound, camera and screen monitors. "We did a lot of ground work before the film started rolling. When the film got shot, we were 100 per cent sure, what was coming. I had worked the film in my mind and had only to frame it in reality," he signs off.
