Mumbai: Chidambaram recently appeared on the IMDb original series ‘On The Scene’ to discuss his newly released adventure-thriller directorial, Manjummel Boys. The movie is based on a true incident from 2006 and revolves around a group of friends from a small town called Manjummel near Kochi, who decide to take a vacation in Kodaikanal. The director shared interesting insights about the movie, the camaraderie between the cast, the most challenging day on the sets, and much more.
When asked to describe the most challenging day on the sets of Manjummel Boys, the director said, “We were shooting in a high-altitude place, which is cold, and we are coastal people. Every day was hard; we had to wake up very early. When we had permission to shoot in the real Guna caves, our timing to shoot there was from 5 am to 9 am. We had to finish shooting by 9 am and get out before the tourists and the public arrived. So that was a hard part, and every day we had to take all the equipment and the crew down the caves, which is a very dangerous place. There were a lot of holes here and there. If you don’t know the exact path, it can be fatal. There was a lot of crowd control, continuity of the background actors, plus rain, and we had to be wet in that climate so early in the morning.”
When asked to narrate a story from the sets that nobody knows about yet, Chidambaram replied, “I would say that the monkey skull that we show in the film was actually obtained when I went into the Guna cave for the first time. It almost looks like a human skull. It’s pretty terrifying. Actually, Kamal (Haasan) sir also got a monkey skull from Guna cave. And that exact skull is used by him in Hey Ram. There is a shot in the movie where three monkey skulls are placed, and that skull comes from Guna.”
When asked if the director would consider remaking Manjummel Boys in other languages after its huge success, he remarked, “There will be a bunch of boys in every corner of the world who will end up doing something like this, and they’ll get rescued. Friendship and love are very universal things. It’s a real story, so I don’t know how it will be received. If it’s entirely fictional, will it receive as much acceptance as it is getting right now? That also I am not very sure about, but yeah, I am very open to remakes and reinterpretations. Yeah, I think that should go on its own.”
