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Kumararaja Super Deluxe scriptwriting

‘WHAT IF’!! THE ‘SUPER DELUXE’ CRACK CODE

Published by ANIRBAN B on 23rd April 2020

No, I can’t wait any more.

This self-imposed exile from blogging is gnawing at my ligaments like a regiment of termites; the wobble in all my joints are asking me, can you really do anything at all about the ‘situation’ out there?

If you can’t, why don’t you do what you can?

Just write, without spreading misinformation; let the experts do their job.

Yes, the cinema halls are still not open, and there’s no way of knowing when they will come back, and even if they do, whether they will also be required to maintain social distancing. Like airlines, with a gap of two seats, where one family of four members pays for 12 seats … and popcorns are seat delivered with drones, flying at a height that doesn’t interrupt the projection. Also thermal screening at entry points, sound proof masks to muffle coughing sounds and sanitization after every show …

Although, I admit, keeping your hands to yourself might improve your focus on the film; but I also have a nagging doubt that might lead to more flops rather than hits, across the spectrum.

Now that’s a “WHAT IF” situation that I can do without.

Anyways, back to the business!!

Vijay Sethupathy at the sets of Super Deluxe. Photo courtesy C H Balu.

When I saw Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s film SUPER DELUXE for the first time, I was trying to find a reason of why anyone should make a film like this?  For someone who has spent a lifetime researching and writing documentaries, I was invariably looking for a social angle somewhere. More so because that makes me happier about a film, nothing else.

I did surmise that all the four stories have elements of social taboo at its center-stage. We have an unhappily married wife having comfort-sex with her ex-boyfriend; a mother who is also a porn-actress, while her husband is a miracle-healer, and they don’t seem to get along; we have a man who comes back home after a sex-change, opting to become a transvestite, and his son craving for a father; and we also have a group of teenage boys watching porn and ending up negotiating murder-deals with local dons and sex-deals with, believe it or not, an alien who can clone humans with her bare hands.

So what exactly was Kumararaja trying to do here? Was he trying to question social stereotypes? Trying to point out the anomalies/dictums we have in our society that forces us to judge people due to their personal actions/choices/origins??

It turns out I was completely off the mark.

“I STARTED OFF WITH LOT OF WHAT-IFS.”

It was not in any particular order, like they occurred in one sitting or anything like that; at various points of time in my life I think, I may have come up with these WHAT IFs.

Like what if a father becomes a transgender? Or, when people just happily watch porn, what could be the worst thing that could happen? What if they happen to chance upon one of their mum’s in the film?

 So these kinds of what ifs were there with me; I still have some of these what ifs with me, and I was thinking that I shouldn’t do a multiple storyline since I have already done one in Aranya Kandam.  That was the starting point.

 You think of WHAT IF because you are not normal.

 Otherwise, what if you order tea and get a tea? That’s what you ordered, so there’s no surprise and there’s no story in that. So I thought – even if these things happen, where does that take us? A story is always about how we come to terms with that – as an audience, or as characters, as people who go through that.

 In my previous film, all the characters and stories converge, and focus into one climax. Here I thought I will not to do the same thing. It’s boring to do that. So I thought I will make a variation where I will make characters criss-cross at various points of the film. Some start off as one story and split into two and some overlap with each other at some points and some overlap in the end. And eventually they move away.

 So that was the idea behind it. It has nothing to do with let’s question the system and all that! Having said that, the idea of writing is to put forth a question, to provoke the audience; and here, when I am talking about the audience, I am not just talking about others, I am also talking about myself.

 You know, how would I react? How would the audience react?

 See I made this film also to see the reaction on the audience’s face. It’s very fascinating to see how people would react to something like this. That was the driving force even when we were doing the scenes, or when I was writing and fleshing out the scenes. The idea was not make a scene too intense, or too light. It was more like a slice of life where something happens, and in that one moment things go wrong, things go right, things also become funny.

 Also, sometimes, it’s just one thing, but it is perceived in different ways.

 In fact that is the reason why I feel this film has hit the spot in one way – where I know that some people will be completely put off by the film; some will get completely excited and some will like certain portions and not like certain portions.

 You know, even when we were sitting in the theaters along with people, I knew that there were some scenes in which people would just laugh out loud and some people will completely cringe in disgust – so that was how it was meant to be.

It was supposed to evoke various reactions. So the same moment was supposed to create different reactions in people – and it did just that.  

That seems like having a lot of fun to me, with all due respects. With myself, as well as others.

But then, why make movies if you are not enjoying the creative process?

Being serious doesn’t necessarily mean being murky and miserable – there are as many ways to tell the story you want to tell as there are humans in this planet. Cinema is flexible; it gives you an overabundance of opportunities to express yourself, while having fun, if you want to have it. That thin balance between making your point while not turning esoteric and preachy is the hallmark of Super Deluxe – all the way.

What if you found out that your mom is a porn actress

The fact that Kumararaja enjoys every building block of film-making is evident in the scrupulous details with which he sets up his scenes. He knows what he wants, and keeps searching for it till he gets it, almost ruthlessly, and relentlessly.

Nothing about Super Deluxe is non-commercial, but it does feel like good cinema. That’s where it wins, hands on, and all the way.

 

“I LIKE A CERTAIN KIND OF ARCHITECTURE”

 

I like certain elements that I can bring on-screen – so I instruct my assistant directors to find buildings that have that kind of quality.

 When I speak to my art-director I tell them that I like properties that are of this quality, that are from this era; you know generally people do it for period films, but I like to have those things because it’s not that we have eighties properties only in the eighties and nineties properties only in the nineties. I kind of want that lived-in feel, where we use properties from the fifties, sixties – to know that the grandparents used to live here and when the father was young, he might have accumulated a few things and the son who is now the main character in the film, now he is retaining these things at that house. So we kind of put all those properties.

 Also the kind of lenses that we use – I would like to have lot of property to create the kind of depth that I can create in that frame. So those are things that we bring in.

 With the DoP, especially with that of my previous film, we started thinking about how the lights are going to be, so I kind of ask for certain things; elements that will reflect light, elements that will refract light etc.

 Then we stick to the color schemes.  How do you bring gradations? I ask my DoP’s about the latitude. I would like to have about 8 to 10, or 12 f-stops in a frame, ideally, so that it feels like very old black and white films where they had so many grades in that – so I like to have those things. So we work on that. Sometimes that is achieved with the costume, sometimes with help from the Art Department – so it’s like collaboration with all the people coming together.

 That’s with the visuals. Where you choose certain locations, and then you take away certain elements from the screen so that other things are highlighted. You put certain things on screen so that certain things are covered. And also add certain elements to bring out the character’s life to the front.

 Like, if you see in Super Deluxe, all the walls or all the houses have some things on the walls – that kind of tells things about them. Like in Samantha and Fahad’s house, you have paintings in the walls, but not paintings in frames but things painted on the wall. And if you see the story of the boys, in their houses, you have things cut from magazines and stuck on the wall; that’s how they decorate their place. And then you have Vijay Sethupati’s house – where it has history on the wall, where you have elements from the grandfather’s days, elements from the father’s days, from Vijay Sethupati’s young age, photographs, and old paintings, even paintings taken from magazines that were framed, not stuck on wall.

 So these kind of things; you know people behave very similarly – yet they have their own unique quality of displaying the same quality. So that brings out the similarity and the differences in them – like different strata, and different parts of the city.

 I may have missed out on lots of areas, but this should give you a brief idea of how we approached the visual component of the film.

Yet another working still from the set …with Samantha and Fahadh. Photo courtesy C R Balu.

Yet another fascinating aspect of the film is its highlighted sound-ecosystem – which can’t quite be compared with anything that I have seen in Indian cinema, as yet. Sound here has its own story to tell, and sometimes even without a visual support.

I had the opportunity to speak with Tapas Nayak, the sound designer of the film a couple of months back. He told me, for him, working with Kumararaja had been much like a twist-filled challenge laced with elements of a joyride, and a true-blue exercise in using sound as a character.

I already covered some of his observations in my post with him, which you can find HERE.

Here’s some more, specific to Super Deluxe.

“SOMETHING OR OTHER IS HAPPENNING, ALL THE TIME”

TAPAS NAYAK, SOUND DESIGNER

 

There were a few challenges in the film – like when we started off with the first story, of the character Veembu, when she finds that her lover is dead on the bed, and her husband is just about to arrive – so we had to work quite a lot on that scene.

 The director wanted that the sound of the husband coming, the bike-sound, should first happen in her head. Only after that you see the real bike. So it’s done in such a way that there’s silence, and then she jumps out of the bed realizing that her lover is dead, and then suddenly she starts hallucinating, the bike sound enters with a thumping rhythm increasing in intensity and then you cut to the real husband coming – where she sees from the window that he is coming, and she doesn’t know how to react to the situation.

 Fact is, the whole film has been treated with a very complicated sound scheme – and something or other is happening all the time. So when the film was being made, the metro work was also ongoing in the city, so there were these constant drilling, boring sounds happening throughout, everywhere.

 For example, the police station sequence, where Vijay Sethupathi’s character is caught up with this lecherous guy. There is a constant conversation happening between them, and a little boy is also caught up in the situation.

 So the director wanted to have a constant tension to be there. But how do you do that without having music in it? So then we thought – let’s have a Lethe factory sound constantly churning out, a constant cycle thing that is happening in the background. So that liberty is taken in lots of other sequences.

 So there’s also this fan that is constantly rotating, with a screeching sound.

 All these cyclic-sounds were put throughout the film to constantly underline the tension which is there. So if you notice it – it is there, but if you don’t notice it you are just part of the story happening in the foreground.

 In fact the director’s approach here is not minimal. He wants to make things more striking. If you remember, even in that basement scene, where the miracle healer meets the transgender – that subway has the texture of a constant drilling – and all that are happening throughout.

 On the surface, it might seem that all this is not doing anything, but when you go deeper, it has a real impact on your viewing experience.

I sincerely believe it would be a worthwhile exercise to talk to every key crew member of the film – and find out from them about their personal experiences and anecdotes about the making of the film. I did want to talk at least with the editor Sathyaraj Natarajan and the score composer Yuvan Shankar Raja – since watching the film was almost like going through their experience of making the film, with a barrage of questions included.

That promo is from Yuvan Shankar Raja’s you-tube channel…. I found it superrr funnny …

I feel this film has been widely celebrated, but not understood neither discussed enough, from a making viewpoint. That needs the length of a complete book. That would help generations of film-makers in India to approach hyper-linked story-lines.

But yes, from what I have felt in my brief interaction with Kumararaja, he doesn’t seem to be the right candidate to sit down and write a book about his own film. In any case, it’s been a year – and he seems to have moved on.

I sincerely hope someone else will find it worthwhile to take up that responsibility.

For me, it’s back to the soundscape now, from the director’s perception, and from a screenwriting perspective.  I was keen to know how much of all those sound highlights were determined at the scripting stage.  

“I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A ‘WORLD’ AROUND EACH LOCATION”

 

In terms of sound, I write some in the script; a little more comes when we shoot – and a lot of it comes during post-production.

 I can give you some examples. The beads in Samantha’s house were done when we were designing the house; like the revolving door inside Samantha’s house, I thought, can give an interesting sound; and then, the tape recorder, it was there in the script. The TV was also there in the script; and when Samantha and Fahadh are talking in a hush-hush tone that was there in the script as well.

 I wanted to retain certain elements from Aranya Kandam; so I had this Piler, this pounding sound, which I had used in the climax of Aranya Kandam. So here, in Super Deluxe, when the boy is running to stab her mom, we get to hear that same pounding sound.  Few elements like that.

 Also, in the clinic sequence, Ramakrishna is trying to save her son, but the camera is on Cana – the audio of this guy trying to get old silk sarees and jarees and stuff like that – that sound was there in writing. And then there’s a speaker that keeps playing the sound of the ocean in Myshkin’s Chapel – that was there in the script.

 So some of the sound was written in the script; but some elements, like the railway station right next to Samantha Fahad’s space, or the small lathe factory that is there right next to the police station – those were things added in post-production. The death procession that happens near Idimin’s house or the cat sound that comes in Idimin’s house – those were all added. When I say it was added I mean those are sounds that were even conceived during post production and not during shooting.

 But I would like to add certain things; like the beads in Samantha Fahad’s house or certain things – we put them in while we were shooting.  Like we had lot of clocks in Vijay Sethupati’s house, which makes for a very interesting soundscape; the plastic bags in the Seth girl’s house were there in the script. I knew that would provide us an opportunity to put in some interesting sound design on that.

 While we were doing Super Deluxe, I told my Foley people that I would like to have a world around those locations. So this railway station was put in some kind of place in Samantha Fahad’s house, then a market place right next to the Seth girl’s house, and a mosque was specially placed close to Vijay Sethupati’s house – and stuff like that.

 The siren of the ambulance used in Myshkin’s small chapel which comes to pick up his son, it is the same sound that has been used when the boys are about to poison this guy, and they pray.  The idea is that this guy is praying thinking it is for somebody else, but it is actually for his own friend. 

 So those things were written in the script; but I would like to add as many elements as possible in the film; I would like to add the elements on-screen to give the audience an idea where the sound is coming from – to show them the source.

 If it is something as mundane as a fan or something, then you don’t have to show; or if it is something very out of place, like a lathe factory, I feel you don’t have to show them. But if they are things in- between, then you really have to show them; like the sound of the plastic bags – can be kept on screen. These are elements that if you don’t see, you won’t understand what the sound is – so it is nicer to have them on-screen.

 Similarly, the source of sound of the song ‘Kuch Dil Ne Kaha’ at the Seth girl’s house, when all the plastic bags go up in the air; for a moment there is lot of electricity in the air, and then this record player starts to play and then you hear the song.

 We also kind of worked with the voices.

 I didn’t want to go with baritones; I didn’t want people to have too much of base in their voice. I wanted a rough, sharp kind of voice, more like a Javed Akhtar kind of tone. That’s something I thought would be very interesting for all the characters. So it was kind of difficult for us to crack the tone for Berlin, Vijay Sethupati, Samantha and others. To get that right texture while recording we used some special mikes – and thumb braces. These are places where we have fun – when you are doing these things.

 So I wanted to have a unique texture for the entire cast, so we worked on that to achieve that. Just one or two people in the film had normal voices – the rest were all tweaked. Tweaked as in we pushed all those actors to give that kind of tone in dubbing. Even Myshkin’s assistant Ramaswami’s tone, if you listen to it carefully, it is not his natural tone – it’ slightly moved away from his natural tone.

 We worked on it to get that exact tone – so that was fun.

I think that largely sums up, as of now, my humble attempt to look at SUPER DELUXE from a screenwriting perspective. Between this post and the earlier one, where we looked at the scripting process, we have covered at least some ground.

I will give you a link of my earlier post here.

KUMARARAJA: MASTERING THE “MULTIPLE” STORY-LINE

And yes, to reiterate myself, I am done with waiting.

I don’t think the disaster management act prevents me from writing about cinema, or about people or ideas associated with storytelling. I think we really could do with some positivity here – despite Corona, and its economic ramifications.

In any case, social distancing comes naturally to a social recluse like me; all the more reason why I should be getting back to my usual weekend blogging – from this week onward.

Meanwhile, I did manage to speak to one of the greatest visual storytellers of all time. 

In case you are wondering, it’s Santosh Sivan.

That’s next in therewillbetime; asap.

Santish Sivan Interview promo
Santosh Sivan in therewillbetime …coming soon
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8 Comments

    • ANIRBAN B ANIRBAN B

      True. Like Tapas said – if you listen to it, only then it becomes obvious. Much work was done on that area.

      # 24th April 2020 Reply

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