Confident about Irumbu Thirai’s success: Mithran

The director of Vishal's next opens up about his debut film ahead of its release on friday
Confident about Irumbu Thirai’s success: Mithran

The makers of Vishal-starrer Irumbu Thirai screened the first half of the film for the press yesterday. Director PS Mithran says the objective was “to create a buzz without spoilers.” 

He smiles and says, “I knew I had done a good job and I am quite confident that audiences will like it. When the team and I were bouncing off ideas, someone suggested that we screen the first half to the media the way the Avengers’ crew did. It is a popular trend in Hollywood.”

Mithran says his film talks about the other side of digital India. “Sometime in 2011, my friend got an SMS from a leading bank saying `40,000 was debited from his account. He was confused. We went to the bank, where we were told the transaction happened in Venezuela. They treated the issue as a trivial one, and asked us to file a complaint with police. We did everything we could to get the money back, but our efforts were futile. Till today, we don’t know how this happened. It made me furious,” he recalls. “In real life it was Venezuela —in the film, I changed it into Brazil. That’s the only difference,” he adds. 

During the course of his research, Mithran came to know that there are many pending cyber crime cases, which remain unsolved yet. “It took six years for me to research about bank-related frauds and develop the script.”  

Mithran says when he wrote the script, he did not know it would be a massive film. “I didn’t write the film with Vishal in mind, but my friends told me I needed to sell my story in a way that would reach the masses.”

The filmmaker feels there’s no awareness about cyber crime among us. “We implictly trust banks and authorities. How many of us know the exact details of each of our transactions? Who keeps an account of this these days? Also, cyber crimes have no jurisdiction, which makes it difficult to report them. Without solving these issues, we’re talking about digital India, which is ridiculous!” Mithran adds that Irumbu Thirai is not a “straight social issue film; we’ve just shown how our system works, how ignorant the common man is, and how that’s being taken advantage of.” He says he has also tried to provide a solution to this issue at the end of the film. 

The film is getting released this Friday.

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