Y.Sunita Chowdhary
A producer doesn’t mean someone who just arranges finances and enjoys seeing his credits roll by on the screen. A film begins and ends with the producer and Sujata Narayanan, a producer from Chennai has pretty much enjoyed her role from the inception, to supervision and packaging the story; she has come up with an anthology for a streaming platform that is significant and tangible and currently is building an audience for her film. In a chat with Klapboardpost.com, she says it was a challenge to wrap up a film following the government regulations during the peak of the pandemic but now after seeing the output, she feels her best intentions and decisions have borne fruit. Addham is all set to be out on AhA on October 16.
Sujata is from Chennai, comes from a film family and is well connected to the people in the industry. Her uncles have been associated with Vijaya Vauhini, Gemini Studios and by the time she was on this planet, they were all gone. “One grows up listening to stories and you like the idea of wanting to be a part of the industry. I started working with Kamal Hassan and others very early and had been part of various aspects of production. Cinema can be made in any language and Telugu was spoken by almost everyone in my house and all the stars would visit our house. In fact cinema history was handed over to me from black and white days and I grew up on a diet of good movies,” says the young and articulate producer. She has been running her production Dreamcatchers for the last ten years. She met her partner Devasena at Radio Mirchi and they run it together. It didn’t happen overnight, Sujata worked with a lot of people and then started her company.
She says her connection with Hyderabad began when she was a child and it could be everlasting. “Hyderabad is very special for me, we launched Radio Mirchi there and I was with that group for ten years. I am a writer as well, a journalist and I believe everything begins with the written word. Maybe I will direct a film but I first wanted to own a company like that of Maniratnam’s and Kamal Hassan’s. Their investment is their own talent, they are not corporate. I want an entity like that, a combination of person and talent and also like to be behind the legacy of certain productions like we had ..AVM, Prasads, Gemini etc.” Sujatha and Devasena fuel each other’s energies and complement each other perfectly. While Devasena, her working partner is planned, organised and has a logical approach to things, Sujatha describes herself as being creative, working on films and ideas and anything on cinema excites her. Ultimately it is their collective strength that comes to the table.
While Addham is her fiction production, she had done a lot of advertisements which were mostly directed by Gautam Menon. Co-incidentally, all her initial independent work happened in Hyderabad, be it setting her base for her work, her first commercial in Telugu or now her first fiction series in AhA in Telugu. She says Allu Aravind has been a mentor to their team and she has invited Chiranjeevi to launch Radio Mirchi. “One half of my brain always is in Hyderabad”, quips Sujatha.
How did she select her content? When inspiration sparks, the producer is the one holding the flint to the kindling. “It came about during Covid. All of us were stuck at home, we were bouncing ideas and at this time digital platforms were coming out with short content, some of it anthology content. It required a primarily lesser number of days to shoot. We can’t plan to shoot for 40 or 50 days but it wasn’t the case a few months ago. We came up with a bunch of stories that we could shoot in a limited time and put it together and the making had to be like a feature film. For stories, we went to Shiva Anand who did Chukkalo Chandrudu in Telugu, he is the writer of all the three stories and director of one.” The Challenge of selecting a story was none for Sujatha, she was just keen to have many genres and she believed that anyone listening to Shiva’s stories would automatically connect to it. She knew his scope as she has been a writer herself and was sure the stories would have depth, humour, serious approach to drama and the characters would stand out.
She further says, “Next was to get actors and we couldn’t travel to Hyderabad for casting due to Covid, it wasn’t our priority to have Tamil actors for the Telugu project and given a choice we would have had a perfect mix of Telugu and Tamil actresses. Varalakshmi has been doing 3 projects in Telugu, Prasanna did one project in Telugu, Rohini is a Telugu actor and all live in Chennai and they didn’t have Corona, they tested negative and they came and shot. A fair amount of things fell in place, it wasn’t easy though.”
They found a very good guiding force in editor Sreekar Prasad who stood shoulder to shoulder with them, guiding the team right through from writing stage to sitting with directors before shoot. “He treated me and Devasena as he would treat a big producer. He would send footage to us and asks if it is okay and things like that were bigger blessings, the happiness of working with people like him is inexplicable. Film making is a collaborative effort, personalities also should mix and sync and just not ideas. It is like people coming together for a good cause.”
The theme of Addham is morality. In life you are presented with a lot of situations that make you want to choose. Then what is the right thing to do or what is right for you? Society may say you are wrong but you might still do that because you think it is right for you. You are going to be shown the mirror and also you are going to see characters who are going to show you the mirror which is why it is Addham. It is a reflection of society, the reflection of each individual in that film. One is a feel good romance, one is a serious emotional dilemma drama, another a rural story but all are about human relationships. We had directors who came to us in short notice and yes, music and cinematography are strong points,” she signs off.
