Exclusive! Director KV Guhan: WWW was a huge learning curve, we were close to releasing it theatrically

Cinematographer-turned-director KV Guhan, whose career as a filmmaker took off with Inidhu Inidhu, has been nicknamed a thriller specialist, given his success with the genre. Films like 118, Highway and WWW have asserted his zest to make quality cinema regarless of the scale or the stature of his lead actors. While Highway on aha is his latest release, he spoke to OTTplay.com about his previous release, the cyber thriller WWW (on SonyLIV) and told how it was a learning curve in more ways than one.

"I was very satisfied with the way I made WWW, but the medium of release was a huge learning curve. Every platform makes a difference, audiences are used to certain brands and prefer viewing there first. I’m not saying releasing on SonyLIV was a mistake but Amazon Prime, Netflix are always the first choice of viewers. We even thought of a theatrical release and did a survey with 200 people on the medium where they want to watch it. Over 95% of them wanted to catch it in a theatre," he shared.

"However, because of budget constraints, we couldn’t go ahead with WWW's theatrical release," Guhan added. The story revolves around a group of people at a software firm, who connect online for work. Vishwa, the team leader, is curious when his colleage Christy is joined by a new roommate at her house, Mithra, a gifted painter. Vishwa and Mithra gradually fall in love with one another. All hell breaks loose when a stranger breaks into Christy's household and a lockdown is announced. The film starred Thrigun, Shivani Rajashekar, Satyam Rajesh and Viva Harsha.

In the times to come, Guhan hopes to strike a balance between theatrical releases and small films where he can afford to experiment. "Though that’s my plan, people from close circles feel I’m stuck with small films. And your track record matters to producers before you make another film.I ideally want to big scale commercial thrillers and I want to take up films that aren’t a hindrance to my ambitions. Like a railway line I want to try two tracks parallelly," Guhan states. 

He is reuniting with Nandamuri Kalyan Ram again after 118 for a big-scale action thriller. His recent release Highway had starred Anand Deverakonda, Manasa Radhakrishnan, Abhishek Banerjee and Saiyami Kher in key roles.