Two boys growing up in a city slum dream of tasting their first slice of pizza. Shades of Slumdog Millionaire? Not really, says M. Manikandan, the director-lensman of KaakaMuttai , the first Tamil debut film to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“I had taken time off from my job as photographer to write a feature film. One day, my son came up to me and said he wanted to eat some pizza, but I couldn’t afford it. It got me thinking about how pizza had become so special to him despite it not being what he usually eats,” says Manikandan.
With the film based in a slum — the kids live in a tiny concrete-and-tin home — comparisons with Slumdog are inevitable. But the emphasis was to say a light story from an Indian perspective, says the first-time director. “There’s a difference between how we see a slum and how Western eyes see it. My film is just a story that unfolds in a slum setting, about globalisation’s effect on our kids. The characters live normal lives like any of us and it’s certainly not an attempt to sell poverty like similar films tend to play out,” he points out.
Produced jointly by national award-winner Dhanush and Vetri Maran, the film’s script struck Manikandan while he was working on another idea. “When my son asked for pizza, I realised I had seen other kids from poor backgrounds saving up for weeks to buy pizza. I kept aside the other script and started Kaaka Muttai .”
The lead roles are played by Ramesh and Ramesh Thilaganathan, whom the director discovered while scouting locations for the film. “I’d taken pictures of various places around the city, along with shots of a few kids in these areas. A few of these faces kept coming back to me even after we auditioned professional child actors. They were not able to behave with the attitude I found in those kids. So, I went back and got them on board. They trained for two months and stayed with the crew during shooting, delivering thoroughly satisfying performances.” Even though shooting with children is challenging even for experienced directors, Manikandan says one makes certain sacrifices for kids to feel at ease.
“There was a lot of responsibility riding on the focus puller, as marking a spot for the kids and asking them to stand there and act would distract them. For most scenes, we used two cameras without heavy lighting so that they could move around freely. They would get tired by about 8.30 p.m.; we had to finish shooting before that. The film was shot over 60 days when it could have been completed in just 40.”
There are risks associated with films that have the ‘festival’ tag, as they might not work commercially. But Manikandan says they made no sacrifices in the budget to make the film the way they had planned it. “Usually, films like these are shot on shoe-string budgets and they lose a certain value in production. When I pitched the script to Dhanush and Vetrimaran, they insisted that it should be a local story narrated with the technical finesse of western films. So we made the film the way we planned, and even erected elaborate sets, with no compromises. It received a standing ovation in Toronto where the audience is like the general public, unlike in Cannes where they are filmmakers and actors.” As he says, an endearing story of two boys told without sluggishness should work universally.
