Sumanth Radhakrishnan, who assisted Subramaniam Siva of Thiruda Thirudi (2003) fame, has turned an independent filmmaker with Sathuram 2, a crowd-funded venture, which will be released this Friday. He tells CE, “The movie has been inspired by James Wan’s psychological horror flick Saw (2004), but it is not a complete rip-off. It’s a new genre and will be a different experience for our audience.”
Interestingly, the crew has given credit to Saw! “People, who loved Saw, will love our film too. It’s an honest attempt. We have titled it Sathuram 2 because it has an intriguing beginning and an ambiguous ending. This is part two, part one is on hold and we’ll work on it later,” he says.
The young director adds how challenging it is to work as a team. “After the Kannada film Lucia (2013), this is the first crowd-funded film which will hit the theatres. Around 35
people have funded the project. Some of them contributed `5 lakh, the rest `2 lakh and so on. The film is devoid of melodramatic elements. There’s just a title song and the running time is 93 minutes.”
Called a ‘philanthropic’ thriller, because of elements of social consciousness attached to it, Sathuram 2 has Yog Japee, Kaushik, Riaz, Suja Varunee and Sanam Shetty in important roles.
Sumanth insists that Kollywood should be more open to crowd-funded initiatives. “Films like these change the notion that people here don’t fund creative projects. Crowd funding in India is picking up. But people are yet to understand how the business of filmmaking works. When you don’t find producers, there are always these like-minded people who come together in case of minimum budget films. A filmmaker can build his own set of audience through social networking sites,” he elaborates.
He didn’t want to go with renowned names because of the predictability and stereotyping factors. “We shot for 35 days, but we spent seven months to edit the film. We have a different editing pattern. Usually, there’s either a linear or non-linear pattern, but this movie will have a reverse story running to the existing tracks. It’s complicated, but we have made it easier to the audience. Raja Sethupathi of Sathuranga Vettai (2014) fame, has done a brilliant job on editing,” he says.
The film revolves around 10 characters and everyone plays a pivotal role in it. How you appreciate life when you face death is the crux of it. Since the crew faced censorship issues, they had to go for crowd-funding. “Initially, nobody was interested , but eventually when people watched Saw on the big screen here, they came forward to support it,” he smiles.
And what’s next? “I am trying to get the remake rights of a successful Hindi film, but haven’t heard from them yet,” he says.