On Ravi K Chandran the Malayalam remake of Andhadhun

We tweaked the script for Prithviraj’s personality. He is an alpha male, who has a physique of a tough You can’t compare him with Ayushmann. RAVI K CHANDRAN, filmmaker

t has been close to seven years since acclaimed cinematographer Ravi K Chandran directed a film and nearly two decades since he worked in a Malayalam movie. So, getting the Dil Chahta Hai (2001) and Saawariya (2007) cinematographer to helm Andhadhun’s Malayalam remake, Bhramam, was a surprise.

On choosing a remake for his directorial effort, Ravi tells us that he had watched Andhadhun (2018) the day it had released and told its director Sriram Raghavan that its quirkiness and characters didn’t quite fit into the film’s setting in Pune. “Else it should have had a Goan setting. I told him it would have been better if the film was set in Fort Kochi, and that’s when he said that he had actually gone to Fort Kochi to see the location and wanted to do the movie with a Malayalam actor. It’s only because he couldn’t get his dates, he pitched it to Ayushmann Khurrana. So that became the trigger point,” he shares.

Ravi is currently shooting for another remake – the Telugu version of Ayyappanum Koshiyum titled Bheemla Nayak – in Hyderabad. Ask him about the risk of remaking a movie, especially one as popular as Andhadhun in Malayalam, and he says, “We all think that everyone has watched it, but honestly only the urban audience would have seen it in Kerala. Even in my crew, 80% of them hadn’t seen it including the sound designer and the writer.”

On the changes in the Malayalam remake, Ravi quips, “We tweaked the script for Prithviraj’s (Prithviraj Sukumaran) personality. He is an alpha male, who has a physique of a tough, well-built man. You can’t compare him with Ayushmann.”