The actor-filmmaker details the incredible journey behind the making of the Blessy directorial in this chat with Galatta Plus
Edited excerpts:
Aadujeevitham is, in many ways, about time. It’s about the time the protagonist, Najeeb, spent in the desert. It’s about the incredible time it took to make this movie. It’s about the time Blessy took to make this movie. Do you think some movies have their own destiny?
I believe all films have. For some films, the journey to eventually meeting that destiny is just a little more complicated than others. In all honesty, none of us anticipated it would be a 16-year-long process. But we knew that it was not going to be a six-month-long process, like a usual Malayalam film back in those days. When we started the process of making the film, Blessy and I thought it was going to be a two-year-long process. And two years is a reasonable time frame to try and pull off something like this. Eventually, when we were able to start filming, in 2018, our entire schedule was within 24 months. We would shoot the Kerala portions, then go to Jordan, then the first desert schedule where I had put on weight, and then we would break for eight months, that was the plan I think, and then do the winter of the weight loss schedule, then shift to Egypt and shoot the escape, and then come back to Kerala and finish the end portions.
Unfortunately, the pandemic struck and we had to suspend the shoot for a year and a half. And then, things changed in terms of permission and how the international regulations were then for film crews to travel. So instead of Egypt, we went to Algeria, to shoot the escape. And it turned out to be a fantastic decision because the terrain that we eventually got to shoot, right in the middle of the Sahara desert is unbelievable! To my knowledge, I don’t think any other film crew has ever been there, and I can understand why because it’s very, very tough. In the end, it turned out to be a good decision, but then we shot in Algeria, then we came back to Jordan and finished what we couldn’t finish when the pandemic had struck.
Later, we came back to Kerala and finished the film. So it became like a four-year-long shooting process. At the end of a 12-year-long ideating process and trying to get the project rolling, followed by a year-and-a-half of post-production. It became a part of all our lives. When I said yes to the film, I was not married. I wasn’t a father, obviously. I had not turned producer. I had not turned director. I wasn’t a distributor. My life has changed over 16 years so much. And the one constant that was there was this one film. Â
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