Why Vetri Maaran says every Tamil film cannot be Baahubali

In an interview to a regional channel, Vetri Maaran heartily laughs off reports that claim he had plans to become a cricketer. "Everyone in India at some point does," he says. "In that sense I did too, and joined the YMCA, only to realise much later that they didn't have a cricket team," he adds, explaining why that plan - however trivial - blew.

But years later, when he dropped out of his masters degree to join veteran filmmaker Balu Mahendra, he hit the nail on his dream future, knowing little perhaps on how austere and spot-on his training was going to be. "Everything I am doing and will be doing is a result of what he has taught me; barring of course the few things I learnt from my own experiences," he says squarely and stops, unwilling to wax eloquent about his guru any further in any long, teary-eyed speech.

Most things for Vetri Maaran are as simple. And illustrating this sense of no-nonsense best are his movies. "Visaranai deals with the sort of pain and truth that must be shared," he explains about his latest film, which produced by Dhanush, will be the first Tamil film to be featured in the competitive category of the Venice Film Festival in its 72 years. Drawing essence from a novel called Lock Up by M Chandrakumar, the film's trailer is raw and gripping and leaves you reflecting in impact for a while. It is as radically unrefined as the subject matter it explores: violent police investigations. It shows Dinesh Ravi and Aadukalam Murugadoss tied, caned and strewn across your monitor screen in different times of the day. It is a story Vetri Maaran says he readily took up after reading the novel, at a time when he was hunting for content.

"It's common for me to get reflective. Every script I write has some portions of my life in it. If you have content that is universally appealing and has the sensibility to reach an international audience, it works," he says.

What's unlikely about a new-age filmmaker like him is his perception that there has been little or no evolution in his approach in the over 15 years that he has been in the industry. What began as a fascination for watching movies on the big screen snowballed in him to ravenously write short stories and poetry in his first year of college and finally halted with the realisation that there was something significant missing in these art forms. "They weren't adequate and I figured I should start writing scripts," he says.

Vetri Maaran has shown a keen interest in choosing unique lifestyles and building his stories around them; perhaps the only constant he acknowledges about himself over the years. "Polladhavan is a story about a bike. A lot of people compare it to Bicycle Thieves and I tell them it's a disgrace to that film to be contrasted against mine. Aadukalam is about the subculture of rooster fights - also a subject that caught my fancy."

But that's as far as he goes about his own films, saying he easily overdoes them. "I cannot see my films once they're done; not at the premiere, not even on TV when a song from them is played."

Observing the current environment for alternative content as "welcoming" Vetri Maaran explains the Tamil film industry by telling us what it's not. "It is not impenetrable, new filmmakers are no more reliant on conventional techniques and the audience is definitely not shallow. They've refined a great deal and if you're truthful to yourself, decide your target audience and are able to pitch your film, it will sell. This also means you fully understand an implicit rule that every film cannot and will not give you a 300 crore turnaround like Baahubali did."