Of math and emotions

Director Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari on how she recreated Nil Battey Sannata as Amma Kanakku and the stellar cast she worked with

June 22, 2016 04:55 pm | Updated October 18, 2016 12:50 pm IST - CHENNAI

Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari

Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari

It’s not often that your debut film becomes a critical and commercial hit, and you get to direct its remake too. That’s what happened to advertising professional-turned director Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, with Nil Battey Sannata (Hindi) and Amma Kanakku , which releases on Friday.

Nil Battey …, the tale of a domestic help who has aspirations for her daughter, struck a chord because of the subject, and the realism the movie is steeped in. The characters are not plucked out of a storybook, but from life. The daughter is cruel without meaning to, the mother is adamant with good reason, the woman she works for is understanding, and the school teacher is strict yet finds reasons to smile…

That’s what we’ll get to see in Tamil too. “From Agra, we’ve moved to Central Chennai. The storyline and screenplay are the same, but I worked around the new milieu the film is set in. I’ve recreated the movie rather than copy it,” says Ashwiny.

And, that was very difficult to do. “I knew that one person was responsible for it. Good or bad, I was in charge. But, I approached this as a whole new movie,” she says.

That’s something Ashwiny consciously does. “I don’t generally watch too many Tamil or Hindi films. I don’t like getting influenced by anything. As creative people, if you look at something as an example, you tend to replicate that.”

What she does is squirrel away myriad music references in her head. “When I play it in my mind, I know what the scene is going to look like,” says Ashwiny. For Nil Battey … that reference was Amit Trivedi’s compositions.

For both movies, Ashwiny has had an exemplary talent pool to direct. If it was Ratna Pathak Shah, Swara Bhaskar and Pankaj Tripathi in Hindi, in Tamil, it is Revathy, Amala Paul and Samuthirakani. Then, there’s Ilaiyaraaja’s music. “I like working with the actors, discussing things with them… For me, characters are drawn from real-life experiences. When a character defines the actor, things work well,” she says, and continues: “Ratna has a fun personality, but Revathy maam is dignified and deep-rooted. That worked well for us. Amala did her homework well. The film was a big risk for her, in a day and age when everyone digs the de-glam, thin look. As for Samuthirakani, after a slew of serious roles, he took on a character with jovial shades. He gave me a free hand to direct him, and said this was a once-in-a-lifetime role for him.”

There’s a little more anger on display in Amma Kanakku , because, “I feel we are culturally very strong, but when we get angry, we get very, very angry”. Also, the relationship between Revathy and Amala borders more on respect than the friendliness that marked the Hindi version. As for the language, it occupies a space between kochai tamizh and its refined equivalent. “It’s grungy, a little thick… like someone who’s been eating paaku for a long time will speak…”

These geographical indicators are important to Ashwiny, who is married to director Nitesh Tiwari, and is directing Manmarziyan . “That’s a different milieu altogether. It is a love story set in Amritsar, and while researching, I felt I should have taken up anthropology. A film must speak the language of the city it’s set in.”

But, Amma Kannaku is special, because with it, Ashwiny works in the language she first learnt. “When Dhanush asked me to make the movie in Tamil, my mother was the most excited. She always wanted me to go to Chennai and act in television. But, being the typical middle-class Mumbai girl, I scoffed at it. And now, with this, she feels I’m giving back to the place I come from.”

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