How ‘Lucia’ paved the way for Pawan Kumar and Rahul to collaborate for the web series ‘Kudi Yedamaithe’

Director Pawan Kumar and actor Rahul Vijay hold forth on their Telugu web series ‘Kudi Yedamaithe’

Two of the most defining films in director Pawan Kumar’s career so far, the Kannada projects Lucia (2013) and U-Turn (2016; he later remade U-Turn in Tamil and Telugu) have been thrillers. He describes his next Kannada film Dvitva, starring Puneet Rajkumar, as a family drama-thriller. His new Telugu web series Kudi Yedamaithe, which is scheduled to premiere on Aha on July 16, is a science fiction thriller starring Amala Paul and Rahul Vijay. “I choose stories, not the genre. But yes, I seem to be in the thriller space. I am trying to make Dvitva more of a family drama than a thriller. The silent short film [Asmite] I did during lockdown is a family drama,” he says, during the course of this interview. The story of Kudi Yedamaithe (If right becomes left) was written by Ram Vignesh and the streaming platform Aha approached Pawan through his friend and filmmaker Nandini Reddy. “I liked the story and how certain events repeat themselves on a time loop,” says Pawan. The broad storyline involves two characters — Amala Paul as a cop and Rahul Vijay as a delivery agent working for a company called ‘Repeat’ — caught in a series of repetitive events. “Rahul is also an aspiring actor; he and Amala try to find their way out of the loop,” adds Pawan. He got on board the project late August 2020 and the next two months were spent in finalising the script, followed by online reading sessions with Amala Paul and Rahul Vijay. After a three-week pre-production schedule in November, the team filmed four hours of content within 48 days: “Usually it takes 100 to 120 days to film content for a two-hour feature. We were dealing with a lot more content. In normal practice, a director has no easy access to all the content filmed until the editing stage. I didn’t want to wait that long,” he says.