GV Prakash's Immortal hides a creature behind a love story

The Immortal trailer sells a bachelor romance. A man looking for a room, a woman looking for a flatmate, some easy comedy, a couple of songs. GV Prakash Kumar says that is exactly the point, and he spent a chunk of the shoot teasing his producer about it.

“Sir, you are promoting it like a pure love story, but there is an entire creature thriller inside,” he told Arunkumar Dhanasekaran. The producer cut it that way deliberately, aiming at college crowds and family audiences on day one and keeping the second half sealed. “His instincts have worked,” GV Prakash conceded.

What the trailer withholds is a 4,000 year old creature that traps Mahi and Sindhu inside their own apartment. The film was originally called Saaga Varam, the boon of immortality, before the team switched to an English title that carried the scale of the mythology they had built. “It is a romantic survival vampire thriller,” GV Prakash said. “A genre that has barely been touched in Indian cinema.”

The commitment ran to two years: one year of filming, one full year of visual effects rendering at animation studios in Canada and Australia. That schedule was agreed before a frame was shot. “For a brand new producer to put that money into an experimental survival thriller and then wait two years without compromising on quality takes conviction,” GV Prakash said. When Mariyappan Chinna first narrated the script, GV Prakash asked him outright whether he had lifted it from a Hollywood creature film. The director said no, it was original, and kept saying so.

He also talked up cinematographer Arun Radhakrishnan, who shot Blast and Rebel and is now behind the camera on GV Prakash’s film with Selvaraghavan. “He is going to be one of Indian cinema’s great visual masters,” he said. On Sam CS, currently scoring most of the thrillers in the industry, the note was drier: “Sam, leave some films for the rest of us.”

The year behind him has been unusually loaded. Happy Raj worked, Youth was a large hit, Vishwanath and Sons landed commercially, and the Telugu release Irumudi outperformed everything he expected of it. Of what is ahead, the two he is betting hardest on are Immortal and Mandaadi, the Soori sports drama he has scored, followed by Nayi Naveli, his first full Hindi soundtrack. Nineteen or twenty of his twenty-four films as an actor have been with first-time directors, a number he brought up without being asked.

Mariyappan Chinna is the twentieth. He got to Arunkumar through editor Shan Lokesh, and the first answer was no. “I told him I can’t produce this,” the producer said. “It sounded like a Hollywood project. If we bet everything on the creature and the CGI fails, the whole film collapses.” Mariyappan went away, spent seven months with a visual effects studio in Canada, and came back with a finished 3D creature model. That was the pitch that worked.

Casting the lead came after. Arunkumar looked at a couple of established names before Mariyappan sent him Kayadu Lohar’s photographs, having noticed her in the Malayalam period film Pathonpatham Noottandu. They cropped her picture next to GV Prakash’s to see how the pairing read. AK Film Factory signed her before anyone else in Tamil cinema did; she went on to Dragon, then to Dijo Jose Antony’s Pallichattambi in Malayalam, and has not stopped since.

She arrived on set without a word of Tamil. Mariyappan narrated the whole screenplay to her in English, then built dialogue sheets in English, Hindi and Tamil for every scene, and took her through the meaning, the formal pronunciation, the Chennai colloquial version and finally the breaths and pauses. She kept a notebook of phonetic notation for every line. Kumar Natarajan, watching from the sidelines, told the director she should dub in her own voice. “Better than most of us,” he said.

The physical load fell on GV Prakash. Night shoots, rope harnesses off high-rise ledges, drops out of tree canopies, and a climax shot in freezing forest conditions with leeches and rain machines running through the night. He refused stunt doubles for all of it. “I watched the monitor scared for his safety,” Mariyappan said. The film was shot in and around Chennai and Kerala, and Arun Radhakrishnan, who lost days to weather in those forest schedules, said the production never once told them to hurry: build the apartment world and the forest world with maximum contrast, take the days you need.

TM Karthik nearly did not do the film at all. Mariyappan called him two years before the shoot, narrated the story, and Karthik told him flatly that the character was thin, a role that comes and goes. The director took the note, rewrote it into a full-length part, and phoned back two years later. “I am not a superstar,” Karthik said. “He took my feedback, expanded the character, and came back for me. I had to do it.” August marks his thirty-second year on stage, where ninety-five percent of his work has been serious drama, and Immortal is not a comedy role. “There may be laughs, but in a horror thriller people laugh to release fear, not because someone cracked a joke.”

He also reminded GV Prakash of an IT company music competition years ago where Karthik played the flute and GV Prakash was the judge who gave him a prize. “I think he gave it to me just to stop me playing Rahman songs.”

Kumar Natarajan, who has spent years being cast as a doctor, a policeman, a judge or the heroine’s father, took the part for the escape. “I have played a doctor so often that if someone falls sick at home I nearly start writing prescriptions.” He also confessed he had never met his own producer until the day of the event. “He never came to set once. Every director dreams of a producer like that.”

Sam CS scored the second half with a full live orchestra to match what the VFX teams were sending back. When Mariyappan showed him the rough cut, the composer was blunt: the story and screenplay held, but the entire back half rested on the creature. Fail there and the film falls; land it and it runs. The updates from Canada kept arriving and the doubt went away. “In our industry creature films usually falter because the VFX is rushed or underfunded. This one has no compromises.”

His favourite memory of the shoot is not musical. He had sent the teaser stems to the mixing studio and flown to Sri Lanka for another job when Arunkumar started calling. Sam ignored him, reasoning the studio would deliver the file anyway. Ten minutes later he turned around in Sri Lanka and the producer was standing behind him. “We looked at each other for five minutes without a word. Then neither of us spoke for days. But I knew exactly what he was thinking: pick up my call next time.”

Sakthivelan, whose Sakthi Film Factory is releasing the film across Tamil Nadu, had the same reservation everyone else did. He watched the trailer, enjoyed the romance, then saw the creature appear at the end and felt his stomach drop. “In Tamil cinema, what filmmakers imagine on paper and what lands on screen are usually two different things.” Vivek of V2 Media showed him the business cut. The shot that changed his mind was the creature standing still, shifting its weight, its facial muscles twitching. He committed to the release before seeing the full film.

His other observation was about GV Prakash’s working hours. Sakthivelan ran into him at a shoot around two in the morning with six or seven scripts mapped out in his head and three meetings with top directors booked for the following morning. “I asked him if he ever sleeps.”

Elsewhere in the credits: sound designer Shiva built the creature’s breathing, growls and footsteps from bio-acoustics research, since there is no regional template for an extinct animal nobody has heard. Rajesh, who came aboard after Shan Lokesh and cut the feature, is doing this as his first job as a lead editor after years as an associate. Sabarish choreographed Vothaiyila, the single GV Prakash composed and Sam CS arranged, his second film with the actor after Rebel. Sherif Master handled the other song.

Immortal opens in theatres on September 4.