PremiumExclusive! VK Prakash: With Erida, I am glad I could realise my dream of working with Nassar sir
The Tamil-Malayalam bilingual, also starring Samyuktha Menon and Kishore, is set to drop on Amazon Prime Video on October 28
Last Updated: 10.03 AM, Oct 27, 2021
In the past few years, director VK Prakash has been pushing boundaries in terms of concept as well as languages. His previous release Praana had only one actor played by Nithya Menen and his next titled Erida, another female-centric thriller, will also mark his Tamil debut of the filmmaker, who has completed 21 years in the industry.
The Tamil-Malayalam bilingual, which has Samyuktha Menon, Nassar and Kishore in the lead, is all set to release on Amazon Prime Video on October 28. In an exclusive interview with OTTplay, the director, who is currently shooting for an advertisement in Hyderabad, tells us, “Erida is a thriller and it would be a roller-coaster ride for the audience.”
The movie was shot entirely in Bengaluru right after the first lockdown last year. This meant that the team had to adhere to all COVID-19 precautionary measures and shoot the movie in a restrictive environment. This, however, didn’t pose too much of a challenge to VKP, whose Praana too followed a similar style of production due to its sync sound and single-character arc and also because of his years of experience in the ad industry shooting with limited budgets and tight deadlines.
“After working in the advertisement industry, conception of a project in any format is easier,” he says. “Right now, I am shooting for an ad that is completely staged with almost 4,000 people. Also, because I am shooting ads regularly, the expertise does lend itself in my feature films as well. For Erida, we shot with a minimal crew and that too in Tamil and Malayalam simultaneously.”
The film also helped him tick off several firsts in his checklist. “It’s my first Tamil movie and I am glad I could realise my dream of working with Nassar sir. I have also been a huge fan of Hareesh Peradi as a theatre actor; he was part of Jayaprakash Kuloor’s troupe. Both of us could share our theatre experience. Also, Nassar sir has a theatre background, and in fact, we were both part of the discussion with this year’s batch of National School of Drama. I had also used him for a voiceover as part of an ad after our collaboration in Erida,” the director says.
On the rest of the cast of the movie, VKP explains, “Kishore is a fabulous actor. Samyuktha, Hareesh Peradi and Dharmajan Bolghatty are those from Malayalam. Samyuktha played her role with beautiful restraint. All these actors being comfortable with both languages helped the film immensely.”
Ask him if the team had decided at the outset that the movie would be an OTT release and he says, “Once we were done with the shoot, OTT was the only viable option. It’s tough to release a movie like this in theatres in Tamil right now.”
The director, however, does have a theatrical release coming up – his Kannada film Vishnu Priya that has Priya Prakash Varrier and Shreyas Manju. “It’s set for a theatrical release on February 11, 2022 and Shreyas Manju is someone I believe can be a huge asset to the Kannada film industry,” explains the director.
He was also set to team up with Priya for a Malayalam film two years ago that was to be scripted by actor Anoop Menon. Ask him about the film’s status and the director reveals, “We are still working on the script. We will be coming together after Trivandrum Lodge for the film, and so want it to stand out. Anoop is also busy with his directorial ventures and he had also scripted Kannan Thamarakkulam’s Varaal. I was actually supposed to direct one of his scripts but the dates were clashing with the ZEE5 webseries Parchayee: Ghost Stories by Ruskin Bond in 2019.”
On the difference in shooting for a webseries and films, VKP, who had helmed two episodes in Parchayee, says, “I shot for 12 days and everything was properly planned in advance. So more than execution, there’s a lot of paperwork involved and as a director, you have to be extremely clear about what you want to do.”
The director, meanwhile, also tells us that he doesn’t have plans of helming another movie this year, as he’s busy shooting advertisements. “I am now tied up with ads till December end. We couldn’t work during the lockdown and so all the projects were delayed,” he concludes.