Rohit MG Krishnan: The initial draft of Iratta didn't have twins

Just like his most talked about debut feature, Iratta, writer-director Rohit MG is judicious and guarded with regard to revealing information about his film. Given the shattering quality of Iratta's most pivotal moments and considering the knowledge that not everyone has seen it, Rohit was particular about keeping this conversation as spoiler-free as possible.

Currently employed as a system administrator at a post office in his hometown, Rohit is a self-taught filmmaker who honed his skills in making short films around a decade ago. After conceiving the script of Iratta in 2017, he shopped it around for a while until it reached the hands of actor Joju George. After it caught Nayattu director Martin Prakkat's interest, the two decided to produce it together, with Rohit at the helm. The involvement of Joju and Martin explains Iratta bearing a visual style similar to Nayattu.

"Aside from the fact that both films occur at a high-range location, we got the same art director working on this too. Besides, cinematographer Vijay was Shyju Khalid's (cinematographer, Nayattu) associate, so we followed a similar lighting pattern," attests Rohit.

The script of Iratta, Rohit says, wasn't reverse engineered starting with the final twist backwards -- the habit of some filmmakers dabbling in the mystery genre. "It all started with an exciting incident at a police station and kept following everything from that point onwards," says Rohit, who initially envisioned a single-setting idea. As for the police station, the team rented the PWD resthouse in Elappara (Idukki) and dressed it up as a police station. "We wanted an apt place with the necessary space for a courtyard, a play area for the kids, a road for media personnel to come..."

Opening the film with a tense sequence of two kids playing cricket was, for Rohit, the right kind of intriguing hook necessary for a limited setting material, followed by an alarming incident and a Rashomon-style of investigation. "It began with the investigation track, and then came the details of these two characters' families," he adds.

Despite having Joju essay two police characters, Iratta is remarkable in that it's drastically different from Joju's portrayal of the cops he played in Joseph and Nayattu. Rohit reveals that Joju's double act wasn't in the original draft. "Two different actors were supposed to play them," he shares. "After Joju chettan suggested, in 2020, that he would play the two characters himself, the script got tweaked accordingly. Before the incorporation of the twins' concept, the script had a hard-hitting climax, but making these two men twins gave the script a whole new dimension; it got more haunting. And the pandemic break proved advantageous for us as we got around two years to rework the script."

To pull off the feat of having the two characters in the same frame, the team opted for the usual approach of seamless placement of dupes, with the aid of a VFX supervisor to handle the portions where they were standing side by side. "It was more of a challenge for the actor than everyone else, even though there were only a few makeup changes," recalls Rohit. "To play two different people in a short span, that too, all on the same day, is no easy feat. It's difficult to postpone filming for the next day. We shot the entire portions with Pramod first and then proceeded with the Vinod ones."

The central incident in Iratta was influenced partly by a similar one that happened a long while ago in Kannur, which gets a passing mention at one point in the film. Following the OTT release, a few viewers raised doubts about the forensic team not identifying a character's fingerprint on the gun early on. Rohit has a reasonable explanation. "It is said that they couldn't get the fingerprint because of the blood's presence. Besides, the rough and hard surface, which enables a stronger grip, makes it difficult to get a fingerprint, unlike from a smooth or flat surface. The same goes for the pistol pouch and its button. We thoroughly researched these things before shooting, as we wanted to avoid any possible loopholes. We consulted a forensic expert. After the film's release, some real forensic experts even attested to this with Facebook posts."

The devasting final revelation in Iratta has invited, among cinephile circles, comparisons to films such as Incendies and Oldboy. Rohit's compulsion to do Iratta was born out of an urge to do something similarly out-of-the-box and hard-hitting. "In Malayalam cinema, such films -- the ones that feel like a hammer blow to the head -- are rare," he observes, adding that most filmmakers are usually reluctant to do something of the kind. "When I pitched this idea to different people, they all doubted the prospect of such a script working out in Kerala. However, we should remember the existence of a section that watches all kinds of films, more than some of us even, so why do the same thing repeatedly?"

Rohit's well-wishers may have been right about expressing those concerns. Still, the film's overall quality hasn't anything to do with it, as Iratta has been trending on social media for the past few weeks post its Netflix release. The filmmaker, who shot Iratta with a theatrical release in mind, assumes the fewer footfalls in theatres is due to most viewers' affinity to lighthearted subjects today. "The trend keeps changing all the time," he says. "Sometimes, people want dark thrillers; sometimes, light entertainers."

Rohit reveres the work of KG George ("versatile; he doesn't do the same film twice") and Alfred Hitchcock ("he doesn't insult the audience's intelligence"). Though he hasn't relied on any references from their films for Iratta, he yearns to make the kind of films they did someday. Rohit has already begun working on new scripts, one for Shah Rukh Khan's Red Chillies Entertainment, but is yet to finalise his next directorial vehicle.