An eerie poster and we all started expecting a white-knuckle thriller from the ‘Memories’ team. Well, Jeethu Joseph’s next starring Prithviraj in the lead belongs to an all-new genre it seems. “‘Oozham definitely is not a thriller. It’s more of a revenge drama with the right amount of action in it. It has fight sequences, but you can’t call it an out-and-out action film either,” clarifies the director.
He says ‘Oozham’ will be a true entertainer with a few surprises strewn in. “I wouldn’t claim that the film will be some out-of-this-world narrative. But there will be elements that will keep you glued to it,” he says. While Divya Pillai, who made her debut opposite Fahad Fazil in ‘Ayal Njanalla’, plays the lead lady, Neeraj Madhav, Irshad,
Sreejith Ravi and Tamil artists Sampath and Jayaprakash are also part of the cast. Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Chennai and Ernakulam are the main location for the film.
The director who enjoys experimenting with genres says he is keen on trying something different each time. “If you ask me I have done only one thriller and that’s ‘Memories’. ‘Drishyam’ was conceived as a conflict between two families, so I am not ready to call it a thriller. I know there are limited genres and I will have to repeat some in my career. But I don’t want only one or two kinds of films in my entire filmography. That’s one reason I did ‘Life of Josutty’ immediately after ‘Drishyam’.” Jeethu adds that he doesn’t want to get branded as an ambassador of thriller films. “I have been working on a horror film and a rom-com, but Oozham materialised first. I consider myself a storyteller rather than a filmmaker. So there is monotony in repeating the same pattern.”
After ‘Oozham’ Jeethu will be starting his project with Kavya Madhavan, a female-oriented thriller. “It’s a fresh and different subject and it totally belongs to that genre. The film will go on floors immediately after ‘Oozham’,” he says