Right in his early teens, stories came to Rahul Ravindran with ease. The earliest he could remember, he wanted to express himself through films, in his seventh grade. The absence of an industry insider to guide him didn’t deter his confidence. He played safe with his academic background and a comfy job in Mumbai, before he quit it to give himself one year to make a mark in the industry. The tables turned and how! In pursuit of turning an assistant director, he grabbed a series of acting offers that paid him well and got his career going. Yet he always remembered he was here to make a film and tell a story someday. “It wasn’t a plan but a dream,” he says.
At a regular party, actor Sushanth chatted about his interest in being a part of a realistic film. “I narrated two scripts and he liked both; then we decided to do the rom-com, which was realistic and yet set in mainstream format. The story was stuck inside me for a long time,” Rahul admits he hasn’t watched any Sushanth film to date, what mattered to him was his personality and the similarity to his protagonist. “It’s a story inspired by an incident in my best friend’s life. The idea was born when I thought, ‘What if the incident had unfolded in a different way’.
He agrees that his decision to pursue both acting and direction is a risk. “I don’t think you know when you are ready. At some level, I had to trust myself. If I were to have more hits in the next couple of years and decided to turn a filmmaker later, it would have been a riskier proposition. This happened only because of the conversation that day.”
This is at a time when we’ve seen the rise of actors-cum-directors in the South, from Sudeep, Prakash Raj, Upendra to Srinivasa Avasarala, S J Suryah, Samuthirakhani and Dhanush. “It’s hard to look beyond Kamal Haasan. My Kamal favourite is Hey Ram (among my top five favourites). Acting and directing it was no mean task. I really liked Dhanush as an actor, he turned a director too. These people have managed it very well; I don’t know if I will.”
He was certain not to act in his directorial debut; he wants to invest all his energies to direct. “I wrote this as a short film script, but eventually kept developing it.” Has he dabbled with short films before this? “Acting taught me a lot about filmmaking. I’ve learnt so much from every director I’ve worked with. I didn’t have time for a short film, acting took up that time. I wrote another short film script too long ago, I’d posted that in my blog recently; anyone wanting to make a film out of it can go ahead.” Meanwhile, he aims to wrap up Sushanth’s film quickly; the shoot commences this October, he wants to complete it in five months. “I have an acting assignment right after the project. I hope to make a good film, act and also direct more in future.” On the acting front, he has another untitled film, besides Sobhan Babu set to release soon.