DIRECTOR ANUCHARAN INTERVIEW

I finished my college in Coimbatore and went on to work in Kolkata for about 1.5 years. Even though I loved being a Design Engineer it still wasn’t enough for me. I was always into movies, but I didn't want to jump straight into the field; I wanted a proper education.

In an interview, Steven Spielberg once said that in order to learn direction one has to learn Animation; so his advice took me on a crazy journey to Australia!

I joined an 18 month “Animation Mentor” course while in Sydney, where I was learning from the masters in the field of animation - including people from Pixar and ILM. I loved it, but I realized I was more into Live action, so I shot Infinity, my first short film on a zero dollar budget, with whatever I had learned in that course. The film was selected for Tropfest Sydney, the world’s biggest short film festival and competed until the semifinal round! Thanks to this, people took notice of me and got a lot of commercial directing work, like music videos, which I shot, directed and edited myself. Somewhere in between I shot Watch Dog my second short and began working on ideas for my own feature film with Mani (M. Manikandan) over Skype. It was really tempting to come to Chennai and start directing movies, so when I came back for a visit for a family function I decided to stay and we created Kirumi.

Casting took a long time. Since the subject was unique, I wanted to keep the treatment fresh and real, for which an unseen combination of actors was necessary.

Hero Kathir immediately shared my enthusiasm towards the subject and actually brought the producers on board. Even though Kirumi is his second movie as an actor, he underwent heavy rehearsals with acting mentors from Koothupatarai for about two months before he could face the camera. He worked very hard to fit into the character.

I always felt that Tamil film makers have forgotten what a fantastic artist, Charle is and I wanted to bring him back. Charle, with his experience, has done an excellent job in “underplaying” the role of a Police informer who blends in with ordinary people to extract information.

Initially I had doubts if Reshmi would fit in as a middle class girl. But her audition tape was very convincing. She is a very talented and matured artist who understands what a character demands and delivers it with ease.

It was very exciting!!! I'll treasure the moment forever. No matter how many movies I make in the future this one will always stay close to my heart. When I finished making this movie, almost everyone who was involved in the project asked me to send it to various film festivals even before seeing the end product. That was the level of confidence they all had in the movie and I'm very happy that their belief in Kirumi has paid off. Thanks to Reel Asian International Film Festival.

I'm somewhere in the middle of happiness, excitement and nervousness. I'm finding it hard to explain how I feel. The most exciting thing about this trip to Toronto is waiting to have that adrenaline rush just few seconds before the movie begins. That black screen always gets me. And to have that rush in Canada is going to be something.