Composer under wraps

Pravin Gandhi’s Pulipaarvai has a ‘surprise’ music director

A still from Pulipaarvai

On August 16, the audio of Pravin Gandhi’s Pulipaarvai will be released. The invitations are ready and will be sent out to film industry personalities and the media soon. So, what’s new, you may ask. Well, though the movie is complete and ready for release in the near future, the identity of the composer has been kept under wraps. It will be revealed only during the event, claims the director.

The filmmaker, who has earlier worked on Ratchagan and Jodi , says the duo has worked on seven numbers for the film. “There are four full-fledged songs and three small ones,” he says, “We have composed a special song on the Buddha as well.”

Pulipaarvai is a film on the life of Balachandran, son of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. The photograph showing the 12-year-old boy eating, just a few hours before being allegedly shot dead, stirred the filmmaker into writing a script. “It was released on February 23,” he recalls, “The next few days, all I was doing was looking at this picture. I wanted to make a film on this boy. But, it is not a documentary — it is a full-fledged movie with sentiment and love.

The film, he says, is ‘part truth and part fiction’ and the main challenge was to find a boy to play the lead role. When he zeroed in on Satya Dev after much effort, he was thrilled. “He has no background in cinema. But once I explained a shot to him, he’d close his eyes and visualise himself enacting the scene and then get ready for the take. That’s a quality Sivaji Ganesan was known for. Director Faasil is known for it too. I was astonished that this boy had that kind of talent in him.”