Empuraan composer Deepak Dev on the trolling he’s facing for the background score of Mohanlal-led film

The Malayalam film Empuraan is currently in the heart of a storm over certain allegedly politically-driven events depicted in it, but on Day 1, when it hit theatres, a lot of the feedback was actually about composer Deepak Dev and the background score he had put together for the film. Fans were less than pleased with the background music for the scenes with Mohanlal in his Khureshi Ab’raam avatar, and the lack of it in some other sequences.

Overall, if the buzz on social media is anything to go, Empuraan deserved much better, according to netizens. The comments, of course, have not escaped the man himself, who addressed it in a recent interview on Originals. Deepak says that he’s only been getting extreme feedback about his work on Empuraan – either people have loved it, or they have absolutely hated it and think he ruined the film. “There’s no middle ground,” says the composer, adding, “The comments on social media are largely negative and quite vehement, so I brought it to the attention of Prithviraj (the director of Empuraan).”

Also read: L2 Empuraan movie review: Prithviraj Sukumaran elevates the stakes with an ambitious but less nuanced follow-up to Lucifer 

The actor-filmmaker, in turn, told Deepak not to pay attention to any of the trolling, because the music that the latter scored for Empuraan was based on a brief by Prithviraj about how he wanted his film to sound. The composer explained that Prithviraj wanted a Hollywood-like feel to the music with live orchestra recordings, among others, rather than standard beats that one can achieve with a high-end keyboard. While Deepak followed this for most part of the film, in a few places he did use the kind of background music that audiences are accustomed to in moments of elevation.

Deepak Dev on wanting to know who was hating his music

“Prithviraj got me to remove all of that; he said that either we had to stick to Khureshi’s black avatar kind of music or Stephen Nedumpally’s. There was no question of mixing the two,” added Deepak. Despite the filmmaker’s suggestion to ignore the trolls, Deepak admits that he tried to find out why people were hating his work so much. Were they musicians and found technical issues, or were these common people? This niggling question bothered him, so he checked out the profiles of people with the vilest comments.

“I checked out 30-40 handles and each had 0 posts, 0 follow, 0 following, with locked profiles, all of which looked the same. These were auto-generated bots as part of a campaign; if I delete one, 2 others spring up. If you choose to keep these comments, you will see that the likes increase in no time. It’s a vicious cycle,” said Deepak.

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