We were scared because we were told that there would be bodies inside and that the pit would be around 1900 feet deep. We had kept lemon in our pockets to apparently ward off evil spirits on advice from the guard, who also had an iron rod in his hands. They did scare us, but once we got inside, everything was fine (laughs).
Tell us about some of the craziest things you had to recreate for the film. And of course the challenges involved.
For the climate, we had a fully centralised AC on set. For the rain, we got a big ice cube that is usually used to transport fish and got around 160 such blocks every day to recreate rain and mist.
At the entrance of Guna caves, there used to be this plaque of Shenbaga Nadar, a merchant from Madurai, who had fallen into a cavern outside Guna cave in 1955. The plaque was there for a few years, but it somehow got displaced with time and climate. It had somehow gotten inside the cave and when we found it, we clicked pictures and recreated it. But nobody knew about this and the general public started clicking pictures next to it thinking it was the original.
Once you go inside our set, you wouldn’t even realise that it was one. Even the tree you see the friends climb was created by us, and so is the stone used to support the camera. It’s all about the time we get. We rarely get this much time to work with films. If we tell production that we need ten days to make a set, the company will tell us to wrap it up in five days. And when we rush, we don’t capture the details. We needed two months for this film because our goal here was perfection.
A few people still don’t believe me that it’s a set. They tell me I’m lying (laughs).