For a debutant filmmaker who has just delivered one of the most-acclaimed hits of the year, Little Hearts, Sai Marthand sounds extremely secure and composed amidst all the euphoria. He hasn’t seen or read any reviews of his film, Marthand tells me, adding, “Except one, by a guy who used to make five-minute filmmaking course videos on his YouTube channel Filmy Geeks, which I would watch and learn from. That’s the only review I watched in full. We are anyway looking at all the audience reactions — that’s the ultimate verdict, and everyone has been exceedingly positive about the film.”
Up until six years ago, the 26-year-old director self-admittedly had no filmmaking plans either. He was rather busy thinking about doing courses for web and Android development after having pursued computer science. Marthand recalls, “I was particularly struggling to learn Android development. It was difficult to survive in that field. That’s when I seriously thought of cinema as a career path. I didn’t have any filmmaking knowledge, but I had knowledge of films. Every film, everyone who has worked on it, which exact day it released — I remember them all. I have always been a cinephile since my growing up years.”
It was this confidence that helped Marthand confidently go about making Little Hearts, even though he had barely made two short films earlier and had no on-set experience. Marthand adds, “My first proper on-set experience was on my own film, Little Hearts.” Marthand, surprisingly, says there’s no major difference between making a short film and a feature film. “The only difference is the audience reach. Earlier, I was the art director on my films. Now I have two assistants, who are credited. There are all these crew members working on the backend. In a short film, you did it all yourself — that’s the only difference. It’s not like I have made a Baahubali, to have created everything from scratch,” he says.
Besides its laugh-a-minute narrative and frothy, youthful vibes, Little Hearts has also been garnering a lot of praise from the industry for achieving its technical finesse on a budget of `2.4 crore. Marthand says that contrary to popular opinion, the producers gave him a lavish budget to make the Mouli starrer. “They spent a lot. Our crew had many members. This same subject can be easily made in `50 lakhs. Okay, maybe the quality of lighting or music production would be slightly lower. But rest everything can be achieved on a smaller budget.”
On a lighter note, Marthand recalls how his producer Aditya Hasan kept pushing him to shoot faster. “Aditya wanted to wrap the shoot in 25-26 days, but I took 32 days.” Marthand also thinks of himself as a perfectionist, and recalls taking multiple takes until he didn’t get some things right, like the voice modulation. He adds, “Dialogue delivery is important. Until that comes out well, I don’t go ahead. Even if a small modulation went wrong, I would take the shot again.”
At all the promotional events so far, Sai Marthand has been vocal about how Little Hearts is largely autobiographical in nature. When I ask him whether he is more like Akhil (Mouli) or his young brother Nikhil (Prajwal), Marthand says the former. He adds, “Be it his innocence, the way he speaks, or his body language, I am mostly like Akhil. Obviously it’s a slightly exaggerated version of myself. After watching the film, all my cousins told me that Mouli spoke exactly like me. I am not that flirtatious though.” (laughs)
Little Hearts doesn’t have a strong dramatic arc but rather rides on its lighthearted moments. Yet, I ask Marthand, there must have been some core themes as his priority as he penned down the script. Marthand explains that he was always sure about keeping both the families rich, corrupt, and morally dubious. He elaborates, “If both the families were lower middle-class and hardworking, and the kids still fooled around, it would be a bad film. It was a deliberate effort to keep Akhil’s father as a fraudulent man, while his mother cheats their maid.” Marthand wove in similar flaws in Khathyayani’s (Shivani Nagaram) parents too. “They have a government job, but they run a clinic on the sly. These are flawed, money-minded people. They push Khathyayani to pursue long-term coaching purely out of ego and their fears of losing reputation. These are all bad people — I had that clarity from the beginning,” he adds.
It’s been a long time since a rom-com has worked in the Telugu industry. While Little Hearts has struck gold at the box office, Marthand has no explanations about the general dearth in this genre. He adds, “I have been carrying another script for a romance for 2 years, but nobody wanted to make it. It’s a serious love story, with a slight fun element — not as fun as Little Hearts, though.”
Despite such relentless humour in Little Hearts, Sai Marthand states that his core focus is always on emotions. He notes, “In Little Hearts, I wanted to capture this emotion of long-distance relationships and a couple staying together. It’s borrowed from my own life.” Marthand goes on to state that he would always like to focus on emotions in his storytelling. “One-side love is an emotion, and so is a breakup. Survival, too, is an emotion, where there is a lot of competition in studies or careers. I want to tell stories about all of them. It’s not necessarily about things that happened to me personally, but emotions that hit me. I believe stories built on emotions will always work,” he concludes.