Sriram Raghavan Interview: On ‘Merry Christmas,’ ‘Ikkis’ and 20 years as a filmmaker
(Originally published in The Hindu on January 10, 2024)
There’s an almost Zen-like quality to how confident Sriram Raghavan seems just days before the release of Merry Christmas, his first film in over five years. Even after a long day with the press, the 60-year-old veteran is eager to give his all in an interaction that makes him any journalist’s dream guest.
The confidence is even more striking because Merry Christmas is Sriram taking a leap of faith outside his comfort zone. Starring Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi, the thriller is his first attempt at a Hindi-Tamil bilingual that was shot with different extended casts. And as he explains, it may also be his last such experiment. “It was fun but the adventure is over. Say, you do a scene in Hindi today; after 15 days, you have to do that scene again in Tamil! Now, do you just replicate the same shots for the scene or do you do something different? This is a huge dilemma; also, the writers in the two languages are different and the languages themselves are very different. Next, I will either make a straight Tamil film or a straight Hindi film only,” says the director.
In these times, one good promo can take a film to unexpected heights and the decision to have two drastically different trailer cuts for Tamil and Hindi has made Merry Christmas all the more intriguing. “I didn’t want people to assume that it was a dubbed film. I decided that the poster and trailer would be designed by two different people who would be shown the film and given the same brief. I was pleasantly surprised by the trailer cuts.”
Sriram is one of the few filmmakers who seem unshaken by the diminishing attention span among audiences. “I know it’s happening because…
Read the full interview here: