For someone who has left everyone who has watched the trailer of her upcoming film — Game Over — on tenterhooks, Kaavya Ramkumar is a bundle of nerves.
A medical practitioner, Kaavya, 27, co-wrote Game Over , which has Taapsee Pannu in the lead, with the film’s director Ashwin Saravanan. The Tamil-Telugu bilingual is scheduled for a June 14 release, alongside a Hindi dubbed version.
But her anxiety, at the moment, is courtesy this writer. “This is the first time I’m being interviewed,” she laughs, adding that she’d even reached out to Ashwin and Taapsee for suggestions on how to get through one.
Dealing with this emotion is not new for the Puducherry girl, who braved it to break the news of her putting aside a career in medicine, to take up writing, to her parents. Which, if you are the 17th person in your family to become a doctor, when you think of it, is a pretty daunting task.
A doc and her pen
But films wouldn’t have happened had Kaavya not been rebellious as a teenager.
What started out as diary entries, mostly about crushes, vivid and lucid in its description, grew into a penchant for compiling short stories. Because words, she adds, were her “only escape” as a student training to be a doctor in a restrictive college atmosphere.
Was dropping out not an option? “I don’t think my parents would have taken me back,” she laughs.
- A self-confessed fan of the journalist-turned-novelist Gillian Flynn, Kaavya is a proponent of her style of scripting flawed female characters. “My writing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea,” she explains. “My women are unconventional, they’re flawed just like they’re in day-to-day life. They’re not on a pedestal, or worshipped,” she adds. Her big dream? To pen a novel like Flynn, someday.
Her stories caught Ashwin’s attention, then a one-film-old director having just completed Maya (2015) with Nayanthara, when her friends shared it with him.
They connected on Facebook, and, Kaavya says, the proposal to collaborate on a film popped out.
“It took me some time to come to terms with it. One day I thought I shouldn’t regret passing over the opportunity. So, I took my parents out to dinner and told them what’s happening. It was a little hard for them to accept at first, but they were never the type to clip my wings,” she says.
Now, adds Kaavya, her parents — Prof S Ramkumar, who is Dean, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Veterinary Education and Research, and Vidyaa Ramkumar, who is chairperson of the District Local Complaints Committee, Puducherry — are her “front row cheerleaders”.
“My ammamma (grandmother) took some more time to be convinced. She likes that I’m getting paid for writing,” she says, smiling.
Ready player one
In Game Over , Taapsee plays a video gamer who suffers Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and, more specifically, experiences “anniversary reaction”, or the anniversary effect as it is referred to in the study of psychology.
The trailer gives us a protagonist who is stuck in a wheelchair, even as she becomes the target of what could be a deadly home invasion.
“Since [films] most often make women the prey, the core idea was to show how a normal person, without any superpowers, who is stuck in that situation would do... to fend for herself. She doesn’t always have to be the damsel in distress. She can be her own knight in shining armour,” says Kaavya.
But the crucial element in her scripting of characters is just how much she draws from her own to make one. “The women in my stories have pieces of me in them. I write women that I want to be, whom I see and hear about, but am too scared to be them,” she says.
While casting Taapsee for Game Over was the director’s call, until she met the Manmarziyaan actor, Kaavya wasn’t sure what to expect.
“Only after meeting her I knew that there are two kinds of actors — one who rehearses, and one who is spontaneous,” she says, adding Taapsee belongs in the latter category. “When we left her house after discussing the script, I knew we had left Swapna [Taapsee’s character in the film] behind,” she says.
A co-worker’s tale
But the process of co-creating a thriller film can be draining and cumbersome, as Kaavya discovered during the course of it.
Though she admits to being in sync with the creative frequencies of Ashwin — whom she calls her mentor — she had to learn finding the middle ground the hard way.
“When I wrote short stories, there was no one to interfere. But here, I had to learn to deal with someone saying ‘No, I’m not happy with this’. There were times when I wanted to murder [Ashwin]...”
Err.. this goes on record?
“Maybe, strangle him would be a little nicer!” she laughs. “It is just that some scenes wouldn’t work for him and I would not be able to understand why! It was a roller coaster ride [working with Ashwin],” she adds.
Her collaboration with Ashwin is likely to continue for now, as they are in talks to develop a horror film next. But when the time comes to branch out, she is clear about a few things.
“Who the director is... is very important. Because I give my heart and soul to write a scene. When it comes on screen, and if I feel that it doesn’t do justice to what I have written... I would be devastated. So, I think, I’m going to be incredibly choosy on who I’ll work with because I want to establish a connect with the person, similar to what I have with Ashwin. They must know and be okay with the fact that I’d like to be involved in every aspect of developing the film, and that I ask a lot of questions... and that can be annoying,” she laughs, concluding that there is no other way she would do it.
“I’m in this for the joy that writing gives me. I never want to think of it in terms of business.”
