This is going to be a strange story on what’s been dubbed over and over again as an epic Indian film of all times. There is no specific occasion to write about My Dear Kuttichathan now, 36 years after its release, except that you don’t really need one. The film’s achieved so much. It’s the first stereoscopic three dimensional film in India. It has stunned everyone, young and old, who saw it. It has worked for generation after generation. What more reason do you need to write about it on a random Tuesday?
Not that we woke up thinking of writing about Kuttichathan 36 years and one month after its release. An article was floating about the internet on the actor who played the title role, now working as a leading advocate in Kochi. He was a child in ’84.
The film’s never been forgotten about. But writing about it with memories of the team that made it would be so refreshing, we thought.
Here comes the strange part of the story. Quite a few people who worked for the film did not wish to talk about it unless its director, Jijo Punnoose, spoke first. Jijo is, if you have bothered searching about him, an enigma himself. He made two landmark films – no exaggeration here – in the gap of two years and then whoosh, disappeared. Both films were made by the Navodaya Studio and Appachan – Jijo’s dad – was the producer. In 2001 he made a brief return to cinema with Magic Magic, another 3D film. And now he is coming back again with a script for the first film that Mohanlal will direct, Barroz.
Poster of Padayottam
Padayottam, his first film was arguably the first 70 mm film in India (Sholay came seven years before but the post production work was done abroad). And then he made a 3D film, having ice cream cones and menacing daggers pop out of the screen, scaring the lives out of the audience wearing those strange dark goggles for the first time. He had children walk up the walls, objects moving in thin air and a driverless rickshaw go madly about the road.
The film centres around children – Lakshmi (Sonia) and two neighbourhood boys Vijay and Vinod played by Suresh and Mukesh. They face the usual hardships of school life – a bully at school, another rich boy who splashes water on them as he passes in his Benz while they are in a cycle rickshaw. There is the strict Math sir (Rajan P Dev) with his overalls and the drunkard artist dad of Lakshmi (Dalip Tahil) messing up life.
That’s when they accidentally release the Kuttichathan – goblin – from a jar in which an evil sorcerer (Kottarakkara Sreedharan Nair) has trapped him to help hunt for treasure.
Kuttichathan appears in the form of a boy (Aravind) as the children desire, in a white dhoti. He is invisible to everyone else but the three kids. The movie is short, so the magical journey they have begins right away – the earlier mentioned stunts, and certain bar scenes that are especially funny. Most of the humour comes from the stunned reactions of the adults who cannot understand what’s going on – a glass of whiskey moving away (Kuttichathan loves his drink), another drained out of the last drop, a door opening on its own. The drunks at the bar brush most of it away as their drunken stupor until they see a little girl single-handedly raise her grownup dad from the floor and walk away (they don’t see Kuttichathan lifting him from the other end).
Scene of the driverless rickshaw
Yes, yes, you might raise a brow and muse what the big deal is, you see that all the time – now. But this was 1984, when a phone was an object with a long twirling cable fixed to a spot and computers were funny looking little boxes in another country.
It would be great to speak to Jijo about all of it. But he has sadly been unavailable through days, without any response to the messages or calls. And beyond a point, you have to respect a person’s space and assume that they wouldn’t be interested in a story.
But without Jijo’s comments, neither his producer brother Jose (he and Appachan were producers of Kuttichathan), nor his then Assistant Director TK Rajeev Kumar – who is now a respected filmmaker, would talk. There seems to be an unwritten protocol among all those who worked in that magical team – writer Raghunath Paleri, art director Sheker, all pointed to the director.
Team behind Kuttichathan (captioned within the picture)
Only Sonia, one of the lead child actors of the movie, spoke. She was too little then and I thought she’d hardly remember any of it. But like Old Rose would surprise her young audience in the movie Titanic, remembering an old, old tale, Sonia tells you as many details as a seven-year-old would have grasped back then.
“Maybe because my life is so interconnected to it or maybe because people kept talking about the film all these years, I remember everything about it,” Sonia says on a call from Chennai.
Kuttichathan was the first film where she played a prominent role – till then it was as one among the kids in a movie. “I was also the only female actor, the only other woman character – my mother – was a painting on the wall! I remember being treated like a princess.”
The 30 days they had planned for became 75 days. That much work had gone into perfecting the shots. The 3D lens was brought from the US by David uncle and Deborah aunty, Sonia says. That’s the stereographer of the film David Schmier. “I have no idea how I did it but I spoke to them for long hours in whatever English I knew back then. I was also very comfortable with Dalip Tahil, the Bollywood actor who played my dad," she says.
Mothers of the four children watching anxiously from outside the set
There were many misadventures on the set, Sonia says. She had lost her milk teeth at the time and was wearing an artificial set, which went missing one day. There was panic in the sets when everyone thought she swallowed it and she was taken for an X-Ray. Luckily the teeth were unswallowed and the shooting resumed after she got a new set.
She also remembers shopping across Ernakulam when the baby pink dress and cap she wears for the main song sequence faded and they needed an exact replacement. Another time she held helium balloons in her hand and lost her grip on the ground.
But the best of all was the song sequence – the most popular ‘Aalippazham’ song from Kuttichathan. TK Rajeev Kumar still has that song as his caller tune..
Watch: The Aalippazham song
Sonia remembers the shooting with the excitement of a child. “The walls would rotate! One side wall would fall to the ground and then the ceiling and then the other side wall. All through this you have to keep your balance. It was scary because only the children could be inside this room at the time! No adults! Mukesh, the youngest, was so scared that he stayed away from most of the ‘wall climbing’ and stuck to a swing and a chair on the ground!” Sonia says.
Luckily, Jijo has written extensively about this most alluring song sequence on a blog – from the rotating rig that was constructed exclusively for this purpose to the many technical challenges to the beats of the song charmingly composed by Ilaiyaraaja.
It’s funny as it is informative. He writes, “One of the nightmares for a film director in the 1980s was his audience deciding to take toilet beaks during song sequences and walking out in droves from the cinema hall! Songs which couldn't hold the audience's attention were ill-timed, ill-conceived and poorly picturised, so they walked out. The only people happy with such songs were the canteen contractors in the theaters. (We are talking of those times when inside the auditorium popcorn was not delivered, …. one couldn't text messages on their phones or surf sites on their iPads).”
He worried about the monotony of a room being shot for an entire song and the scenes before and after. “Now, imagine my plight…I had to picturise an entire song within a rigidly confined space 30ft by 14ft by 9ft!”
Sonia remembers that the ‘operating cameraman’ was tied up in one corner of this room and he would turn upside down, in tune with the rotation.
Watch: Short clipping on reality versus illusion of the song
This was Soman, who pointed out to Jijo that the camera can’t be left alone and the frame needs ‘constant recomposing when the subject within it moves’. Jijo describes the ‘tied-up cameraman’ thus: “It was Soman, harnessed to the rotating set, who went around head over heels operating the camera. He took up this additional responsibility of filming some of the crucial shots. One may note that in recent years such camera operations are done through gimbal mounted remote camera jibs.”
Among the brilliant ideas that popped up during the shooting, one had to do with the position of the children when they sat on the blades of the ceiling fan. There were four kids and only three blades. While Jijo thought of getting a fan with four blades, Rajeev Kumar went and stood on the centre hub, mimicking the Kuttichathan with ‘hands on his hips, eyes rolling and swaying to the melody’. That image remained etched in his mind, Jijo writes in his 2017 blog.
The ceiling fan scene / Caption by Jijo
It was also Rajeev Kumar who thought of bringing a baby elephant in the trumpet sequence of another song.
Another shock was when the chief carpenter of the team that constructed this room suddenly disappeared after the work. With a few ‘nearly disastrous’ incidents following this, Jijo was not sure if he ‘would have been under severe strain (and severely doubtful of the outcome) in executing this unconventional set, and hence sought the maximum distance between his handiwork and himself at the earliest.’
Jijo hardly slept those nights – his sleeping hours were reduced to four, he writes. He dreamt of disoriented landscapes even in his dreams. Several of the crew would be similarly disoriented, forgetting which is the ceiling and which is the floor when everything kept changing. He narrates an incident of cinematographer Ashok who fretted over a missing ‘junior light’ until his assistant Vijayalakshmy pointed upwards.
But all the sleeplessness paid off when he saw the result. He was one of the first to shout when the rush prints came and they watched with their 3D glasses. “Even with so much responsibility weighing on my conscience (I usually delegate away tasks as much as possible) I enjoyed a surprisingly blissful confidence.”
(All images from Jijo's blog)