Pawan with a fresh look

Tamil director Vishnuvardhan makes his debut in Telugu cinema with a Pawan Kalyan starrer. With five films behind him, he is more known here for Billa ; the movie that was remade in Telugu with Prabhas and Anushka and directed by Meher Ramesh. The director says, “I was approached to do the Telugu version but I wasn’t excited with the idea of working with the same subject. I always felt if I were to direct a film in Telugu it would be with a fresh plot.” Vishnuvardhan and Pawan Kalyan had a common friend in S.J. Suryah and one meeting was enough to get the film started and the producers were finalised, everything then fell in place.”

The director’s grandparents are from West Godavari but he was born and brought up in Chennai, lived in Mumbai for seven years working as an assistant director for Santosh Sivan’s films. So does one find traces of the cinematographer in his work? “No way. I struggled for two years to get out of the image people associated me with. We both make very different kind of films but I can’t deny his contribution in shaping my career. Cinematographers look at cinema with one perspective, the angles et al, what I have learnt is the art of visual narration. I love action stories, the action in the script keeps me going and that excitement reflects on the screen.”

Vishnuvardhan says Shadow is just the working title and they would announce the actual one in two week’s time. He describes Pawan Kalyan as an uncomplicated person and they had given him an entirely new look for this film, with cropped hair, beard, glasses and a costume.

He adds, “He’s playing a mature man, working professional. In every film you design the architecture first, and I zeroed in on Kolkata, I was keen on having the colonial and Victorian look. The city becomes a character and it’s a very contemporary story. We have shot parts of it in Chennai and Kerala. It’s been the fastest journey; we got the film done in four and a half months. Sarah Jane Dias and Anjali Lavania were chosen particularly because I didn’t want the hero and heroines to know each other. A known combination would strip the film of freshness, charm and the mystique. I wanted everything to be new. Yuvan has given some memorable music.”

The director says the only tough part was speaking so many languages on the sets, he was talking Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu, English and the heroines, he guffaws, were actually speaking heavy accented English.