Directed by Sreejith Jayachandran and Pratik Chandran, Dance With The Devil is an 18-minute Malayalam short film that tries to merge elements of a crime thriller and action to create, what the makers call, a film that falls into the neo-noir genre. “We were both assisting director Amal Neerad on Comrade in America, when we felt we could collaborate to make a short film together. The idea was to make a film with the stylisation of film noir with a lot of emphasis on action scenes. That’s how the writing process started,” says Sreejith, who has also written the film.
Starring actor Jinu Joseph, the film grew from a one-line idea into a 24-page script, complete with dialogues, action break-up and a montage. “The idea was to bring in a paradigm shift in terms of the making... the technical finesse needed to be at a higher level than what we usually see in short films. The action scenes needed to be given importance, and for that, we needed to work on writing the build-up. The powerful antagonist is played by Jinu Joseph, but there’s someone who even he is afraid of... that was the bottomline,” adds Sreejith.
The fight scenes were choreographed and executed by professional martial artistes and were shot in the span of four days. “We used a technology called Pre-Vis (pre-visualisation) to conceptualise some of the scenes, which later helped us execute them. It also helped that we got Nikhil Mathew, an assistant to composer Gopi Sunder, to do the music for us,” says Pratik, who has also acted in the film in the role of a gangster.
The short was released on YouTube and also features an original song by singer-composer Riju Andrews Jacob.
Vishal Menon
