Seven years ago, we left George Kutty walking away from a new police station building, glimpses of an immediate past flashing before his eyes. George Kutty with a shovel, earlier digging a hole at the very site where the building now stood, burying a body that the whole town would search for.
Jeethu Joseph, who wrote George Kutty’s story and made a hugely popular film called Drishyam, has now written a sequel. Mohanlal, who played the unforgettable George Kutty, will reprise the role in part 2 of Drishyam.
The film turned out to be so popular that remake after remake got made in other languages, Kamal Haasan playing the lead in the Tamil Papanasam, and Ajay Devgn in the Hindi Drishyam.
In a short interview to TNM, Jeethu said that he had been thinking about a sequel for a few years but it is now that it got written, during the COVID-19 lockdown.
“After Drishyam, there have always been questions about a sequel. Lalettan (Mohanlal) would ask me too. And I just didn’t know how to continue that story. Finally one possibility became clearer than the others I thought of and the story of George Kutty’s family got written again,” Jeethu said.
Jeethu Joseph
He insists that he had approached the original film as a family drama, but somehow it got branded as a thriller. In his mind, only his film Memories qualifies as a thriller. “In the sequel too, I have included the same approach. It is a family drama and we will see the characters seven years after where we had last left them,” said Jeethu.
The same actors will reprise the four characters in George Kutty’s family – Meena playing his wife, Ansiba and Esther playing the daughters. “Not all characters from the first part will be there in the second. There will also be some new characters,” Jeethu said.
He can't reveal much about the script, except that the genre will be a reflection of what we had seen in Drishyam. “Every story, even a love story, has an element of curiosity, and that would definitely be there," he said.
He sent the script to a close circle of friends, Mohanlal and Drishyam’s producer Antony Perumbavoor, too, among them. Both of them liked it a lot, Jeethu said.
The same team had been working on the big budget film Ram when the coronavirus lockdown across the world halted the filming. Ram has to be put on hold now, since the rest of the filming has to take place in the United Kingdom and it will be a while before the team can plan a shoot there. “This is a time for smaller films. As soon as the government allows film shooting, we’ll start planning it, taking care of the safety precautions to be put in place," he said.