The Art of Finding a Story | Raj B Shetty on how Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye came about | Exclusive

The writer-filmmaker-actor talks about how a random incident that lasted only a few minutes triggered a story out of him, which went on to become Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye.

Raj B Shetty on how he sources stories out of everyday life

The germ of an idea is often caught from most placid and unassuming moments of life and for Raj B Shetty, his film Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye was born out of a random phone call. "Swathi (Mutthina Male Haniye) happened because I got a call from someone, who happened to be a housewife. I had met her maybe about 1.5 years ago and not for more than 10 minutes - in fact, I had my friend with me when that happened. She borrowed my number from that friend and gave me a call. We have had no contact with one another in between and she happens to be older than me, already married for 15 years. She gave me a call and asked me how I was doing but didn’t tell me her name. I gave in anyway and began to converse," he reveals.

Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye of course, has been written and directed by Raj who also stars in the film as the male lead, with Siri Ravikumar playing the female lead. The film is actress Ramya's maiden production under the AppleBox Studios banner

"If not personal, it could be hypothetical"

The broader idea, as Raj professes, is that there could be two, and perhaps a few more, essential ways to derive a story from what happens around you. One way, he says, is letting a strong personal experience move you from within and inspire a story. The other is to put yourself in a more hypothetical situation and maybe allow your imagination run a little wild, helping your mind extrapolate and see where you land. To each, their own, though, is the thumb rule according to the Toby actor.

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Revealing more about the mystery phone call, he adds, "She starts to cry and all she does for 1.5 minutes is sob. After that, I said listen, I understand what you’re going through. "What do you understand?" she says. I say, "Nothing, you want to share something but you cannot share because if you were to do that, you would be doing injustice to your family. And yet you want to vent it out, want to cry it out and need someone by your side. But there’s no one. So, that’s why. And then she started crying again and she didn’t say a word after that. The call, eventually, got disconnected."

Though that phone call may seem slightly innocuous to many, Raj says that something triggered in him as soon as the line was broken between them. "I mean, my question is simple: If you are able to confide in someone you met like a year-and-a-half ago you aren't able to trust your husband of 15 years for that, what is the essence of that relationship?" he wonders.

He also shares that the woman never left his thoughts for a long time and soon enough, he found himself thinking about various facets of her everyday life. "I did not even try calling her back but I wondered all the time what she was up to in that particular moment: was she readying her kids for school? What did she think about while serving breakfast to her husband? And let's suppose she had a lover somewhere outside, what could that relationship be like? These questions and so many more stayed with me and eventually became Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye" says.

"Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye happened because I did not go looking for a story"

What he is, of course, trying to suggest is that a writer, a filmmaker and an artist, in general, must be receptive to new ideas and can do so only when they are senstive, emotional beings. Or a bhava jeevi as he likes to put it, who is stimulated by some event that occurs from out of nowhere. Of course, for a screenwriter, it isn't enough that they are moved by an incident because the task of translating that into a screenplay involves a technical approach that isn't as ruminative.

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"Let me take these two characters again as an example. Once I felt "emotional" because of that phone call, I realized that the two characters had begun conversing on their own in my head without any intervention. You just cannot stop yourself from looking at them from afar after that - not because you want to but it just happens to you anyway. That's when you decide to give it the structure of a film, because you want to explore more, dig deeper into the psyche of those characters. Why is it this way? What about that? - these kinds of questions are posed to you on their own. You could have a thousand different scenes, so to speak, running on your mind but you end up picking about only 50. And those 50 depend on the individual," shares Raj B Shetty

You can watch OTTplay's full-length candid chat with Raj B Shetty below:

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