I Wrote Iravin Nizhal, But AR Rahman Wrote The Emotions Through His Music: R Parthiban

Actor-director R Parthiban's upcoming film Iravin Nizhal is novel for more reasons than one. Not only is it a single-shot feature, but it is also billed to be the world's first non-linear single shot film. Written and directed by R Parthiban — who also stars in the film — the Tamil movie has music by AR Rahman. In a conversation with Vishal Menon, the filmmaker opens up about the making of the movie.

Speaking about the film's idea, Parthiban says that he was particular about exploring a unique concept for the film. "Even for my first film, Pudhiya Paadhai, I checked what previous big actors did for their first film. Like MGR, Sivaji Ganesan and so on. My question was to see what I would do in my first film. I made that film in a way that no hero was introduced and introduced myself as an arrogant hero in that film. That shock for the audience gives the hook point," he says, adding, "I did not want to do a single shot film because there are already some 12 single shot films. I then googled and saw if there was any film that was non-linear and single shot. There was no film like that, so I wanted to do that first. Only then the story came to my mind."

The actor also opens up about how he choreographs scenes for a non-linear film like Iravin Nizhal. "I'm not very rigid with my script. I can shift the scenes according to the possibility of the location. Otherwise, we can't do this kind of a film. There were a lot of changes from the original script. It was easy to shift scenes because it was already supposed to be in a non-linear manner," he says. 

The actor, who is also working with maestro llaiyaraaja on the Hindi remake of Oththa Seruppu, speaks about the musical styles of both AR Rahman and Ilaiyaraaja. "I put almost 21 crores to finish the film. At the time of post-production, Rahman sir was in Dubai.  I used to go at least four times a month to Dubai to meet with him. And in one month or a week, he will add only one flute music. But in those days, when I used to work with Ilaiyaraaja, re-recording would mean 3-4 days. And if we give him four days, he will give half a day back. We are used to doing things like that, doing it in real-time. For this film, we will add only one flute music and that is the end of the rerecording. So, we were doing the re-recording for almost ten months. If you see the film, you can feel that the music is the real soul of the film. I wrote the script, but he (AR Rahman) wrote the emotions through his music," Parthiban says.