Until last week, he was Vishnuvardhan's little brother.
Now, with Katradhu Kalavu doing reasonably well at the box office, Krishna can throw away that identity card he had to carry around for years. His first film as hero, Alibaba that released last year, met with favourable reviews, but it was out of the theatres before the word of mouth could spread.
How does he feel about the response to Katradhu Kalavu ? “It is better than what I thought it would be. The city shows are all full. Monday had 65 per cent occupancy. So we are going to do a tour and promote the film. It's doing well in Salem and Coimbatore. We have pumped a lot of money in radio, TV and newspapers.”
After his first film, Krishna wanted to do a gangster film based on a true incident in North Madras. “It was tentatively called Madras because Chennai was Madras back then, to be directed by Krishna, one of the boys from Five Star . But there was some misunderstanding between the director and the producer and we had to shelve it after six-seven months of research. So I went back to the only other script I liked that was narrated to me even before Alibaba. And, I had listened to 30 other scripts but this one kept coming back to me.”
Action comedy
What is the space he wants to capture in Tamil cinema? “It is too early to talk about any image that I want, but I want to do films that interest me, irrespective of how many stars are in it. I think the stunt sequences from the first and the second film have been talked about, and I have tried to do comedy in this film but if there's a genre I want to establish myself in, it would be action comedy,” he says.
“The good thing about Katradhu Kalavu is it is directed by Balaji, but the screenplay and story are by Kumaravel and the dialogues are by Ruben. So it's very Hollywood-ish in terms of execution. So there were specialists for everything. I had a couple of questions once I read the script and after I got my answers, I just shut up. Every time there was a misunderstanding between production and direction, I was the middle-man,” he explains his role in his home production.
“I want people to believe that Krishna only picks good scripts. So I will pick a film that has value irrespective of how big or small my character is. The future of Tamil cinema is in multi-starrers. From the first two films, I think I can manage to carry the film by myself. But with multi-starrers, you get an opportunity to play different kinds of roles. I take my acting seriously, but not the titles associated with it,” says Krishna, laughing off the self-proclaimed titles stars confer upon themselves.
Krishna is no newcomer to films, especially with a producer-dad (‘Pattiyal' Sekhar) and a director-brother in Vishnuvardhan. He was one of the kids in Anjali , a junior artiste in Iruvar and a dancer/choreographer before he left for the U.S. to do MBA. He worked for a year-and-a-half and started his own business that did extremely well, thanks to the software boom.
“I thought I could see myself as an entrepreneur, but I felt like I did not belong there. I hated to wake up because I had to go to work. Here, I can't wait to wake up because I love cinema.”
