The origin story of Vi Anand’s fascination with cinema is quite interesting. It’s this personal experience that helped the filmmaker develop a screenplay sense. “My father, a document writer, used to meet with theatre managers in our hometown and I would accompany him along with my brothers. As we would often enter the theatre only after the screening had begun or leave early, we would come home and imagine the multiple ways in which the story progressed until then or after we left. We would discuss the various directions the story could have travelled in; in other words, we tried to fill in the blanks of the narrative. And as we watched the full film for the second time after all these discussions, it would be a different experience. Sometimes, the director would surpass our expectations, and sometimes our theories used to be more imaginative than the choices in the film.”
Anand grew up in Erode, a town in Tamil Nadu, and his association with filmmakers like Prathap Pothen and AR Murugadoss led him to the Telugu film industry. But as someone who grew up with a staple diet of Tamil cinema, how did the transition from Tamil to Telugu feel like? Acknowledging that there’s a difference in the way the Tamil and Telugu audiences process a movie, Anand elaborates, “Take, for instance, if we are showing a police station in a scene, Telugu audiences are purely interested in the story and travelling with the hero. They want to believe that it’s a police station. In contrast, Tamil audiences might start raising questions such as, ‘Is this what a police station looks like? Is this authentic?’ Telugu audiences are not as critical as Tamil audiences. When you visit a theatre in Hyderabad, you see that Telugu audiences come with a mindset to enjoy.”