Sometime in 2013, when Vetrimaaran was waiting at an airport — he’s not sure it if was Chennai or Mumbai — he browsed the bookstore, as is his habit, and picked up titles that caught his attention. One of his choices was journalist-painter-writer Kota Neelima’s Shoes of the Dead , which deals with farmer suicides.
Three years later, he’s bought the film rights for the book, and hopes to begin work on it after he wraps up his film with Dhanush. “I had not read Neelima before, but I was fascinated by how she handled the story,” Vetrimaaran says.
The director is known for sensitively adapting books into films — the recent Visaranai is an example — and that was exactly what appealed to Neelima too.
“I loved Visaranai and how he’d shot the movie.” says Neelima, whose latest work is The Honest Season. “He’d beautifully captured the hopelessness and the point of view of the characters, making it a film difficult to forget. I’d say he’s one of the most sensitive directors in cinema in the country today. He has the rare ability of seeing a story from different vantage points. That vision is important for the kind of issues I write about. My story has to be told from the perspective of a small farmer. There are many ways of looking at a small farmer. I’d call him someone with limited land holding, not very fertile land; a person with limited options, one of which is suicide.”
Vetrimaaran is known to research for each of his films, lending them sparkling authenticity. How has the experience of working with well-researched books been? ( Visaranai was based on Lock Up ) “I choose only books that I will have pleasure working on,” he says. He even tweeted: “This is a book that I feel needs to be made into a film.”
Though it’s early to speak about the movie, Vetrimaaran says: “The book touched a chord in me, but filmmaking is a challenging process. I hope it turns out well.”
The book, a sweeping saga of farmer suicides and the politics involved, pits Gangiri, who vows to avenge his farmer brother’s suicide, and Keyur, a first-time MP, against each other. As someone who’s seen these affected regions up close for a decade, Kota explores the reasons for the spiralling suicides.
“I look at the role played by the State and politics. Why does a farmer commit suicide? Not just due to crop failure, but a collapse of other things too. It’s simple to blame it on crop failure. I think Vetrimaaran will explore this theme well.”
The director hopes he will do justice to the book, but he’s going to take his time. “I’ve done just three films in nine years. I’m yet to recover from the agony and pain of Visaranai . I need to take my mind off scripting for a while,” he concludes.
