One of the things I found really interesting was how you were able to create so many jokes in Appatha that revolve around wordplay. You’ve been living in Chennai for many years but that kind of humour I’m sure is still very difficult to write.
That’s true. After we locked on the plot points, I wrote Appatha in Malayalam even though we wanted to make the film in Tamil. We had writers who then took my dialogues and scenes from Malayalam to Tamil. But in many instances, it was Urvashi who managed to find the perfect phrases or words to convert my ideas from Malayalam to Tamil. It would be a small change here or there but that would finally make the difference.
But you could have made the same film in Malayalam right, that too with the same lead? Or did you choose to make it in Tamil because the script demands a major shift from a village to a big city, which may not work out that well in the Kerala context?
More than that shift from a place like Pollachi to Chennai, the reason why I work in Tamil is because I work more freely here. In Malayalam there is the pressure of expectations. Then there are these demands for me to work with a certain set of actors. In Tamil, I get to make the kind of films I really want to. More than those big-budget films with many actors, the movies that I absolutely love to make are smaller films like Mukunthetta Sumitra Vilikkunnu (1988) or Vellanakkalude Naadu (1988). It’s the same reason I also made films like Sometimes (2016) and Kanchivaram (2008) in Tamil.