ADARSH of strong content

His directorial debut Shuddhi was a hard-hitting female-oriented flick and his second film too, inadvertently is women-centric. Filmmaker Adarsh Eshwarappa has begun working on his second film Bhinna, which stars Paayal Radhakrishna, Sowmya Jaganmurthy, Siddhartha Madhyamikaa and Shashank Purushotham in the lead. With nearly three weeks of rehearsals behind them, the team begins shooting for the film in July. In a freewheeling chat, Adarsh lets us in on the workshops, drawing inspiration from the legendary Puttanna Kanagaland more…

Talking about their rehearsals, Adarsh reveals, “We had workshops for the actors, mainly for Paayal. Her character is named Kaveri, which was Kalpana’s name in Puttana Kanagal’s Sharapanjara. All my characters’ names are taken from characters in Kanagal’s movies. In the workshop, we asked Paayal to build a backstory for the character which would help her build her role. We did this for Sowmya and Siddharth too,” he shares.

In another exercise, the female actors were asked to come to the rehearsal hall with their make-up kits. “We asked them to take as much time as they thought their characters would take to do their make-up and gave them some exercises.

They had to enact like they’re going out of the house and on the way, Shashank gave them scenarios. We also had a script-reading session where the actors read the script without any emotions. Once everyone was well-versed with their lines, we did the blocking where we imagine the actual location, the props etc,” says Adarsh.

Though his second venture too is women-centric, Adarsh admits that this was an unplanned coincidence. “It was not a conscious decision. Bhinna’s not a socially relevant film like Shuddhi — it’s completely fictional. I wanted to make it low-budget as I wanted to make money for the producer. So, we had minimal locations —this movie is shot in just two houses. It was supposed to be a horror film, but when I finished writing the first half, I couldn’t go beyond it. I kept re-visiting it and that’s when the whole story changed and became female-focused,” he shares.

The passionate filmmaker wants to explore other genres too and reveals that humanity is a theme he’s deeply inclined towards. “Even as an audience, I don’t like the ‘in your face patriotism’ where audiences are manipulated in the name of the country.” So will he ever do a commercial masala flick? “I want to do a big action film, but I can never do a typical commercial one. I’d like to something like the Bourne series — not movies with song and dance! In fact, Bhinna doesn’t have any songs either —it’s a film that goes against the norms,” he states.

A big aficionado of American films, Adarsh looks upto filmmakers Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg. As talk veers towards Shuddhi, which is being appreciated at festivals even a year after its release, Adarsh says, “All this talk feels great. When our movie released, we lost out on a lot of screens in the second and third week. But now, a lot of people have watched it on Netflix or seen the pirated version! I keep getting messages from them. Even if I’d made huge money from the project, it wouldn’t have been as satisfying as hearing these responses from people.”