Sriram Raghavan won’t reveal the title of the novel his upcoming film Merry Christmas has been adapted from. He has bought multiple copies of the book online, maybe to guard the story, similar to something Alfred Hitchcock did back in 1959. Hitchcock, while making Psycho (1960), had bought all published copies of the Robert Bloch book on which the film was based, in order to keep the plot twists under wraps. “He bought like five thousand copies,” says Raghavan. “I bought only three or four that were available online. But it was only to gift it to my friends after the film’s release. Nothing more than that.”
On a sunny Mumbai afternoon, we sit with the director for an interview in the office of Matchbox Pictures, the production house behind Merry Christmas. Raghavan is relaxed and chatty but looks at you with a pensive gaze, searching for plot holes. Books are something the director’s work constantly revolves around. There is almost always a shot of a character leafing through the pages of a potboiler in a Raghavan thriller. His filmography consists of adaptations and influences from various noir novels. Ek Hasina Thi (2004) had elements from Sidney Sheldon’s If Tomorrow Comes, Johnny Gaddaar (2007) was adapted from the 1962 French novel Les mystifies and 2015’s Badlapur was based on the Italian revenge-drama book Death’s Dark Abyss. He has previously stated that he finds adapting books to be easier than coming up with an original story. “I started reading Massimo Carlotto’s book (on which Badlapur is based) after Agent Vinod (2012) had not done well. After the 14th page or so, I stopped reading and tried to write what I thought could happen further. But it was all typical stuff. When I finally read the whole book, it touched me. But I had to keep away the book’s structure and come up with a plot structure for the film. That surely takes time.”
Merry Christmas is coming six years after Raghavan’s last release Andhadhun (2018). Even in the director’s bleak worlds of killing and betrayal, love somewhere finds a small spot. His FTII diploma short, The Eight Column Affair (1987), although a fever dream of a film, is about a runner trying to find his lover before time runs out. Usually, romance takes a side seat in Raghavan’s films once the plot kicks in but the trailer of Merry Christmas seems to indicate that love might just be at the centre of it all. “It does have a very strong romance angle, maybe stronger than my earlier films,” he says. “In Andhadhun, the romance served the plot but here the plot will serve the romance. But it won’t be an easy one, since we have two people constantly trying to hide secrets.”
The film offers a novel pairing of Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi. Raghavan shares that Katrina met him before the release of Andhadhun. “She wanted to do something completely out of her zone. I was supposed to work on Ikkis actually, but then its production kept getting pushed because of logistical issues. I always had the story of Merry Christmas in mind and when I narrated it to her, she loved it,” he says. The director said that he watched Premkumar C’s 2018 romantic film 96, starring Vijay Sethupathi and Trisha Krishnan, on a flight to attend a film festival in Melbourne. “I met Vijay there and felt like the universe was trying to tell me something. He has such a persona that he can be put in any film. He is more of an actor than a star,” he says. “I needed a fresh pairing, so Vijay and Katrina fit perfectly.”
Merry Christmas is shot in two languages: Hindi and Tamil, with different trailers and different sets of supporting actors. The Hindi version has Sanjay Kapoor, Vinay Pathak, Pratima Kazmi and Tinnu Anand, while the Tamil one has Radhika Sarathkumar, Gayathrie and Shanmugarajan amongst others. We ask him what prompted the decision to shoot the film in different languages. “Sometimes, you just want to torture yourself,” says Raghavan, with a chuckle. “Katrina didn’t know Tamil, so we had to devise a language for her, a form of gibberish with English, Hindi and Tamil words which she could lip sync to and it would go with the dubbed dialogues on screen,” he adds. “We shot the Tamil version after the Hindi one and it benefited us since then she knew the emotion of the scene.”
The director further said that he got different supporting actors because he didn’t want the films to feel like a dubbed version of each other. “I wanted both the versions to exist on their own. Thus, we also decided to have different poster designs and different promos for each.”
Four days after the release of Merry Christmas, Raghavan will be completing twenty years in the Hindi film industry (His first film Ek Hasina Thi premiered on January 16, 2004). The director is currently working on his next Ikkis, starring Agastya Nanda, which is a biopic of Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal, who was posthumously awarded the Param Vir Chakra. A war drama seems like a major genre shift for Raghavan, known for his pulpy, intricately-devised plots. “I guess I wanted to take a break from the typical thriller,” he says. “Once in a while, it is good to not think where to hide the dead body.”
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