Sriram Raghavan Interview: On ‘Merry Christmas,’ ‘Ikkis’ and 20 years as a filmmaker

‘Merry Christmas’ director Sriram Raghavan speaks about Alfred Hitchcock’s influence on his filmmaking and his wish to create tank battle sequences in his next film ‘Ikkis’

There’s an almost Zen-like quality to how confident Sriram Raghavan seems just days before the release of Merry Christmas, his first film in over five years. Even after a long day with the press, the 60-year-old veteran is eager to give his all in an interaction that makes him any journalist’s dream guest.

The confidence is even more striking because Merry Christmas is Sriram taking a leap of faith outside his comfort zone. Starring Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi, the thriller is his first attempt at a Hindi-Tamil bilingual that was shot with different extended casts. And as he explains, it may also be his last such experiment.

“It was fun but the adventure is over. Say, you do a scene in Hindi today; after 15 days, you have to do that scene again in Tamil! Now, do you just replicate the same shots for the scene or do you do something different? This is a huge dilemma; also, the writers in the two languages are different and the languages themselves are very different. Next, I will either make a straight Tamil film or a straight Hindi film only,” says the director.

In these times, one good promo can take a film to unexpected heights and the decision to have two drastically different trailer cuts for Tamil and Hindi has made Merry Christmas all the more intriguing. “I didn’t want people to assume that it was a dubbed film. I decided that the poster and trailer would be designed by two different people who would be shown the film and given the same brief. I was pleasantly surprised by the trailer cuts.”

Sriram is one of the few filmmakers who seem unshaken by the diminishing attention span among audiences. “I know it’s happening because it sometimes happens to me also; for instance, I spend an hour selecting a movie to watch and by the time I choose one, I am too tired. It’s sad but also inevitable.” The lack of impatience is also why many filmmakers these days hesitate to take the time to build an atmosphere in thrillers. While Sriram agrees that ‘thrill-a-minute’ is a fun technique that some stories can benefit from, building an atmosphere is not something you can do without.

Merry Christmas, he says, begins in a slow-burn fashion, even letting the viewers make up their own scripts in their heads. “The idea is to find a way to subvert that. I don’t believe in rules like ‘If you don’t hook your audience in three minutes, you will lose them’.”

He agrees that this diminishing attention span shouldn’t change the way films are made. ”That’s why I don’t know if many of the big hits we get have a life after the initial release. There’s a beautiful quote by Quentin Tarantino, which goes, ‘In the larger scheme of things, the first few days of a film’s release is the least important time.’ You are not making a film just for a weekend, right?”