Kochi: His first classroom was the shooting locations his sisters went to. Ambika had started acting before he was born. Radha, a little later. Little Suresh would go with each of them to their movie sets. He would hear different languages and speak them. He would watch and learn and understand the movies he saw being made in front of him.
Even his vacations were spent on movie locations all over South India. Suresh Nair not only picked up tips on movies and their making, but the languages too — Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam. Hindi and English he learnt in school. Joining films was like stepping into the front yard of his home.
The most natural thing for him to do. Yet, as he has finished making his first film independently, Suresh Nair looks back at what may have been different in his life.
Medulla Oblongata, his film releasing this week, he says is a story that happened to someone he knew, to the friend of a friend. “It happened two days before his marriage, he was playing cricket and fell down, got hit on the head. There was no bleeding, and he seemed alright at first. But later in the day he started forgetting things. It is because his medulla oblongata was affected in the fall.”
The movie is an entertainer, a fun watch. He picked up four guys he made friends with while playing the Celebrity Cricket League. Rahul Madhav, Arjun Nandakumar, Saiju Kurup and Rakendu Kumar. Avana from Mumbai is the female lead.
That’s his other big interest in life – cricket. He had been pretty serious about it too, got into the Bangalore University for mechanical engineering in sports quota. Anil Kumble was his classmate and they have played cricket together. He couldn’t however, take it up as a profession, it was not encouraged back home. But now when he has the choice of making movies of stories he cared about, Suresh inevitably picked one on cricket. That will come after Medulla Oblongata.
“It will be the first South Indian project by Yashraj Productions. Kumble and Kapil Dev will play themselves in the movie titled Vijay — a bilingual in Tamil and Kannada.”
Movie making was not exactly his first choice. He had begun as an actor like his sisters, back in college. He has appeared in eight or nine films, one of them as the angry cousin of ‘Kuttymalu’ in Lal Jose’s Neelathamara.
“He is the only director I have worked under, and he is the ideal director for me. I worked for him in Neelathamara and Kerala Café. It was like getting a two-year MBA course in two days.”
Armed with a degree in special effects from a Chennai film school and several other courses from a film school in Los Angeles where Suresh went after college, he joined a company making music videos. Keeping his movie ambitions aside for a while, he even worked for a burger company.
He began dreaming of making an English movie one day, like M. Night Shyamalan. It’s been 14 years in the US now, he is a citizen there. But Suresh comes to India, to get his basic dose of Indian cinema. He had co-directed with Ambika, a film called Anabella — the first POV film in India, expected to release in June.
He plans to one day pack the experience of making films in India, and take it to the US to make his dream English venture.
