The Making of Fight Back

            It would not be easy for you to believe if I said Fight Back, my first short film on youtube was in the development for more than one and half a year.

Well, First I must confess that action is not really my genre but I also love to watch some stylish action flicks. Truly a stylish action flick of my kind is very hard to make with all the resources I can ever have.

This is how it all started. If I remember rightly, it was May of 2013 and JayaPrakash (the lead actor of Fight Back) pitched an idea for a short film where the main character wants to fight but he couldn’t. I was really attracted to the frustration of this character and I came up with the title “Fight Back” in a few days. We then had a photo shoot with JayaPrakash posing as an action hero. Those snaps are still a great fun to look at!

I started brainstorming for the script matching the title. Yeah! We actually had a title but no story. I was in hostel during those days and my choice of locations were very limited and I being a true fan of Christopher Nolan had an urge to open my film with a dream sequence (a truly gore fight). I finally came up with a story line – The elder brother avenges his younger brother’s death due to ragging. It was both sentimental and interesting.

Things changed after a month. I really wanted to make a fresh approach towards fight back. I was to Chennai for an inplant training and another main mind changer was me watching “Varanam Ayiram”, a film by one of my favourite directors Gautam Vasudev Menon. If you had watched the movie, you would remember the sequence where Surya gets hit by a guy for talking to a girl. He then comes home and is really frustrated and wants to strike back. His father speaks with him and he then fights back in the next scene. This whole sequence was what I wanted to emulate in Fight Back.

I was watching a lot of movies at that time and I was really confused in coming up with the right script for the title. Yes. I had the title fixed and I wanted a script exactly matching it. But at no point of time, I wanted to do something mediocre or just a blatant rip off from some story, movie or whatever. Copying is a Lie and I never wanted to be a liar in Moviemaking.

It was July of 2013 and I finally came up with a story. A local rowdy harassing an innocent guy and the guy strikes back kind of stuff. It had a comic relief too. A truly tamil masala! We started shooting the movie with Jaya Prakash as the lead, Jeeva Chandra Mohan as the antagonist and Gopal Krishanan as JayaPrakash’s friend.

Somewhere down the line I lost interest in the whole project. Fight Back was not like a Vignesh Priyadarshan movie that I expected. I wanted it to be different, different at least from any stuff that you have ever seen.

Freshness, Creativity, Hope for Growth. These were some of the things that I was searching for with my filmmaking. If the film I make couldn’t make me confident then why make it at all? Searching for something which is a mixture of all these, I took a full 8 month leave from Fight Back. It was just a leave from Fight Back and not from filmmaking. I made a film called “Nee Engae?” which never came to light as I was not fully satisfied with it. It will surely come out in the near future – I promise.

I nearly started another film which was based on a dancer’s struggle to win a reality show. It will also be made soon. During this break period, I was doing a lot of literature search. I was googling for short stories, motivational life histories, inspirational enterpreneurs, social changers and trendsetters but couldn’t find anything worthwhile for a while.

One day so suddenly the idea of remote mobile device explosion struck me and thus was born the new Fight Back. I had the villain character in mind and I knew for sure that Vignesh would be the right choice for the character. I will introduce you to my new find Vignesh. He is a talented dancer and I once asked him whether he is interested in acting and he immediately said yes. Well, truly I was surprised and we had some rehearsals for the dancer movie that I mentioned earlier. But it didn’t come up. He is a kind of multi-talented personality. He is an athlete, football player, kabadi player, a dancer, choreographer (believe me not all dancers are good choreographer, but he is truly a good choreographer) and a stylish actor.

JayaPrakash was the protagonist with no second choice because he was in the team from the beginning. He was the one who made me confident enough to make a movie that’s in this scale. He believes in my vision and that really make me believe in my vision. He can bring surprising variations in his voice which was much evident during the dubbing for the movie.

Jeeva Chandra Mohan, I will really need a whole post to write about him, such a great artist, a dedicated actor who is also a good dancer. I always would like to have tight closeups when he delivers the dialogues. You could see his whole face speak the words, such is his performance. A confession needs to be made at this point, we shot the scene where Jeeva is first introduced in Fight Back in the morning and It was the first ever shot to be taken in the new version. I love this scene to the most. If you don’t get my point, see the scene again where Jeeva puts his suspicion over Karthik’s death.

Sasi Raaja, the cinematographer who captured the vision I had in my mind beautifully and gave it to me digitally. He is a talented director of photography. His style of framing a scene was unique and gave a sense of professionalism to Fight Back. The film is really privileged to have such a person associated with it.

There are many guys whose work you may not see onscreen. Baskaran who is the assistant director and the making cameraman. He was of great help throughout the movie making and giving valuable suggestions then and there. He was also the one who had been associated with Fight Back from the very beginning. I am very sorry that I had to cut a scene featuring him from the movie.

And there are guys who were of help by transporting between locations. Dinesh, Gowthaman, Navaneethan were very supporting during the shoot. Their help was vital.

If you had not noticed it, I would like to add a trivia on the screenplay. For the first few cuts you’ll see that the screenplay follows a unique way of traversing through the knowledge plane. More in common terms, if a character says a dialogue then it cuts to another scene where some character is going to say a similar dialogue. For example, the first cut in the film is from Jaya Prakash saying “Enna da solra?” in phone to the same character saying “Enna da solra?” in person. The same feature continues for several cuts. That’s really nothing to boost of, but I wanted to bring to your attention if you had not noticed it.

Many initial reviewers felt that the fight sequence in the end was very short. I want to make it clear that the sequence takes place in the interval of a phone call. A phone call typically lasts for just 30 seconds and I wanted to have whole sequence within that interval. So obviously the fight needs to be quick and short.

And yes, many compromises need to be made while making a film and when the number of compromises reduces the director grows. Fight Back is my first step and when I look back it is going to be a great start. Thanks to all my friends for making this happen. I finally became a filmmaker.

As James Cameron says, “Make a film and put directed by your name on it and you are a filmmaker” (my paraphrasing of the exact quote)