You would, when you go through the bio data of Karthik Chintu, wonder if you are reading about three different people. One, a very successful sales guy, two, a musician and dancer, and three, a filmmaker. Sort it out into three, and you get a childhood that starts with music and dance, a youth in a marketing career, and a present day of becoming a filmmaker. Sitting with his laptop, a phone that keeps beeping, and a plate of sandwich, he tells you patiently about all these parts of his life, just like his character Mr Saturday would do in the short film he’s just made. That has been an exercise to prove to himself he could direct, an exercise in confidence building. Because what Karthik wanted to do when he came to India was to write, write films, for he had a lot to tell. Direction was something that had to happen. And now that it did, he is ready to do his first feature film, a bilingual called Dwaitham.
A little before, let’s say two or three years ago, Karthik had almost worked in another film. 15hours is a heist story that had impressed Mammootty when he went to meet the actor with Sanjeev Sivan. Sanjeev was to direct, Mammootty to play the lead. For the next eight months, Karthik sat down with the software ‘Final Draft’ to write the script. By then, however, the project could not take off. “Some things don’t work like that. When someone asks me to change some scene in the script, I would tell them, this will affect these other scenes say, 35, 38 and 39. They won’t like this,” Karthik says. It is his friend Praveen P. Gopinath who suggested he do the direction too. “You are trying to direct the director, it is better you direct.”
And when he did direct, he made Praveen ‘Mr Saturday’ and actor Disney James to play the guy whose whole life has been slow because of ‘Shani’ in his horoscope. Karthik has chosen the same two people to play his lead characters in his feature film Dwaitham, whose ani-motion poster has just come out. “You would ask why, with a 3.5 crore rupees budget, I did not go for established actors. Because it should not be an actor you know what to expect from. It uses a new narrative style — seamless multi-linear where the past, present and future are all told at the same time.”
All this has happened in the last few years, when Karthik came to India. Before that, he had a life in Dubai, growing up as a student who hated his studies but loved his music and movies. As a young man, he sang for a show called Sing with AR Rahman, impressing him with his improvised Thendrale — a melody from Kadhal Desam. But in the days that followed, he couldn’t go meet Rahman after the maestro had asked him to, for work at a cargo company kept him busy. From cargo he went to aviation, finding along the way an interest to read and know more about everything. That led to an interest to write, and writing led to storytelling and to Dwaitham. Dwaitham is expected to be ready for release in January or February.
