Sruthi Ganapathy Raman
What was the origin story for Chockan?
Most comedians have their own team to work on stuff for the content of comedy tracks in films. Since Soori sir had a team like that, he had a bank of stories. One of these characters was a poosari (priest) he had seen in real life. The poosari runs everyone’s errands in the village throughout the year. But during the yearly village festival, he is the one who wields the power…the wealthiest of the lot come to him to seek blessings. I found this contrast to be very interesting and turned that into Chockan. I wrote Chockan immediately after my conversation with him, and all of this happened a week before Viduthalai‘s release.
How did you see Soori in this space, considering this is his first such mass commercial role?
I usually like to create heroic moments. But for this film, I also tried to redefine my knowledge of film language. I have created such moments for stars like SK (Sivakarthikeyan) and Dhanush, but for this film, I didn’t have any pressure to cater to the image of a star. I had the full liberty to do anything. I have been closely following the films coming out in the past three years and it helped me understand that commercial films need to be taken to the next level today. So instead of going into templates like songs and other things, I looked at the story and saw if this character actually translated as a real person’s life.