Writer-director Murali Krishnan speaks about The Writer’s Room, his recently released documentary fiction featuring Malayalam novelist and screenwriter GR Indugopan, with the same unhurried clarity that shapes the film. He begins by recalling the spark that guided him.
“As I cited at the end of the film, one of my earliest influences was The Mystery of Picasso (1956) by Henri-Georges Clouzot,” he says, noting how watching Pablo Picasso draw could hold a film together. But filming a writer offers no such built-in spectacle. “With a writer, especially with only him at the centre, it isn’t that simple. You cannot show him writing all the time, so I had to think about the form in a different way,” he explains.
His ideas shifted again after watching Steven Soderbergh’s 2024 film Presence. Its ghostly point of view made him wonder if a documentary could adopt something similar, where the person asking the questions stays unseen. “People mainly want to hear what he thinks. I realised I didn’t need to be visible for that. My voice and his responses were enough.”
He also cites the Macedonian documentary Honeyland (2019) for giving him confidence to blur boundaries between reality and fiction. “Parts of my film may look fictional, but at its core it is still a documentary,” he says.
The title The Writer’s Room grew out of Murali’s long connection with Indugopan, whom he had been visiting for years, even before the writer penned the foreword to Murali's first book Soviet Station Kadavu. “Although I wouldn’t call it a friendship, I do see him as a mentor,” he says. That feeling carries into the upstairs room Indugopan built for himself, a small space with a sofa, scattered papers, and a lived-in clutter. Murali remembers sensing that the room echoed the writer’s prose. “His stories also feel like that room, simple yet layered, like clothes clipped on a line to dry.”
He also wanted to demystify writing, especially for younger filmmakers who assume literary conversations must be dense. “Usually, when you interview writers, their language tends to be heavy or academic, but he is nothing like that.” Their dry humour surfaces too; one viewer joked that it felt as if “two enemies were interviewing each other,” which amused Murali because that slight tension was intentional.
The documentary unfolds through small moments: a hesitant game of chess, a walk in the garden, and chores paired with sudden sparks of thought. Murali notes that Indugopan often links the ordinary to the imaginative. “He talks about how his raw material comes from his own life, from childhood memories, and from news reports.” The routines of the house slipped naturally into the film.
Murali notes that many aspiring actors approach Indugopan hoping for roles in adaptations of his work. He nods to this during a playful moment featuring his longtime collaborator and actor Anand Manmadhan, who got his big break in Ponman, an adaptation of Indugopan's Naalanchu Cheruppakkar.
Interest in Indugopan’s stories has only grown, especially with recent adaptations like Vilaayath Budha. “Today, after MT (Vasudevan Nair), he’s probably one of the most adapted writers in Malayalam cinema,” Murali says. “But he’s also someone who just wants to write quietly,” he adds, a temperament that makes interviews with Indugopan rare.
No line of Indugopan in The Writer's Room is rehearsed. “Everything you hear is spontaneous and honest, which I feel is the soul of the documentary,” he says. To maintain that ease, he filmed on an iPhone. “If he sees a heavy, professional setup, he might have immediately lost interest.”
They finished shooting in three hours, a pace that astonished National Award-winning veteran documentary filmmaker Shiny Benjamin. After watching it, she told Indugopan, “If I had to make a documentary on a writer’s process, I would need hours of footage over several days or weeks. How did he manage this in such a short span of time?”
Years of visiting the house meant he understood its light and movement. Cameraman Anoop V Shylaja needed only brief cues as they captured Indugopan speaking, interrupted now and then by Murali’s gentle teasing. Filmmaker Martin Prakkat and novelist S Hareesh were among those who responded warmly to the film’s intimate style. But the comment Murali treasures most is Indugopan’s own, spoken with self-deprecating humour about a documentary built around him: “It wasn’t as bad as I expected.”
Beyond this film, Murali remains an aspiring feature filmmaker. He co-wrote Sthanarthi Sreekuttan, which gained national attention after its OTT release, a reminder that larger cinematic ambitions lie beneath The Writer’s Room, which is now streaming on YouTube.