PremiumMasterpeace director Sreejith: We deliberately took Wes Anderson’s films as references for the web series
Malayalam web series Masterpeace, which is set to begin streaming on Disney+ Hotstar on October 25, stars Nithya Menen, Sharafudheen, Ashokan, Shanti Krishna, Maala Parvathi and Renji Panicker
Last Updated: 09.37 AM, Oct 23, 2023
In the past two years, Malayalam filmmaker Sreejith N, who made his debut as a director with Oru Thekkan Thallu Case and as a scriptwriter with Bro Daddy, has proved he’s a talent to look out for. His upcoming venture Masterpeace, which will mark the second Malayalam web series on Disney+ Hotstar , will once again see him push creative boundaries.
The Hotstar series, which has Nithya Menen, Sharafudheen, Ashokan, Renji Panicker and Shanti Krishna, is all set to stream on the OTT platform from October 25, and in an exclusive interview with OTTplay, Sreejith tells us what to expect from the series and what went into making it.
From the trailer, Masterpeace seems to be a comedy about a dysfunctional family. Is it?
At its core, Masterpeace is a comedy family-drama. It’s a satire about how the millennials and the generation before them see things. Most of the story happens within a single day and so, there are only limited characters in the entire series. So, we chose the cast based on that because it’s a challenge for the viewers to keep watching them throughout the entire series. We wanted the best cast we could get to keep the audience engaged, and that’s how we arrived at this cast.
What were the challenges for you while doing this web series, which is a format that very few Malayalam filmmakers have worked on?
More than a filmmaker, I consider myself a storyteller. So, it’s just another medium for me. There are obvious changes when you make a film for theatres or a series for OTT, but the base idea of storytelling remains the same. Our tools are human emotions in both cases. And so, for me, I was excited about handling a new medium, that’s all.
From the teaser and trailer, the series had a Wes Anderson-esque feel to it, with the vibrant settings and quirky characters.
Wes Anderson’s films were the references for Masterpeace. This was a web series that was made in probably the lowest budget possible, and so had a minimalistic approach. Even when I say we had taken Wes Anderson's films as reference , to do a similar symmetry in our series, we would have had to erect a set and that wasn’t possible for us at this budget. So, we did what we could in the restricted space and budget.
As I had mentioned, the entire series happens in a house and so we needed a visual design that would further elevate the experience; that’s the reason we had taken inspiration from Wes Anderson’s film. He is a filmmaker that I greatly admire; I have always enjoyed his style of narration and wanted to try it as one of my projects. I thought this was the right medium and project to do that. It’s not made on a big scale. More than scale, this stands apart because of its craft and design.
How much did Nithya Menen, who had worked in OTT projects across languages, help execute Masterpeace?
I have known Nithya for the past eight years and we have been friends. I had earlier planned a movie with her and bounced off the one-liner with her. For this, I explained the way I was planning to shoot the series. When she came to the sets, she told me, ‘This is the first time in my career, I have signed a project without listening to the entire script; I have only heard the storyline.’
There’s a lot of importance to humour in Masterpeace, and having someone as versatile as Sharafudheen would have made your job easier?
Not just Sharaf, everyone in the cast including the senior artistes such as Renji Panicker chettan, Ashokan chettan and Shanti Krishna chechi were all game for this. The casting itself was like the series’ story. We have someone as senior as Ashokan chettan and Shanti Krishna to today’s actors including Sharaf who play the leading characters in Masterpeace. This made the working experience enjoyable. With Sharaf, he’s someone who has a natural gift of comedic timing, and that helped us a lot to pull it off.