The film, which co-stars Priyanka Arul Mohan, Shiva Rajkumar, and Nivedhithaa Sathish, narrates the story of Analeesan’s call for arms to give his village their rightful entry into the temple. While the film is an extension of Arun’s earlier films — Rocky (2021) and Saani Kayidham (2022) — that explored his quest for finding visual beauty in life’s murkiest contours, Captain Miller was still a different organism in his universe, Nuni explains. “I don’t know if we can compare Miller with Arun’s previous two films because I feel the grammar is different. Saani Kayidham was hand-held, grungy and edgy.”
The grammar of Captian Miller was more like Sergio Leone meets South American films like City of God (2002). “It has to be classical frames, but in a different world. That was the pitch when we started.” Take the film’s penchant for long lens shots for instance. “There is this shot of the top of the mountain, looking into the village with the far end of the temple in the background with Dhanush standing in the centre. The inspiration for such shots always come from classics such as Kurosawa‘s films like Yojimbo (1961), Seven Samurai (1954).” By the end of the film, they were literally talking about wide shots with long lenses. “In the epilogue shot where Aditi’s character is interacting at the end of the pier, I remember Arun telling me, “Sid, let’s do a wide shot with 100mm” and I laughed. A wide shot for us was a 100 mm shot. Generally a wide shot would be, say, a 15mm or a 25mm.” This came from a constant need to compress space. “There are three aspects to the village — the village itself, the hillock Mathalamparai, and the temple in the background, both of which are on different levels.”