AMR Ramesh revives ambitious projects

The filmmaker talks about years of research and preparations for a film on Rajiv Gandhi killing and web series on ‘LTTE’

AMR Ramesh

Director AMR Ramesh, known for his realistic plotlines (‘Cyanide’ and ‘Attahasa’) and sensational storytelling, is set begin his ambitious project he announced six years ago.

Ramesh plans to shoot a quadrilingual film on the Rajiv Gandhi killing episode in 1991. As titled first, it will be called ‘Asphota’ in Kannada, ‘Manidha Vedigundu’ in Tamil and ‘Human Bomb’ in Hindi, and Telugu. The film had got stalled for varying reasons. He is also filming a web series on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), the militant group responsible for the assassination. Titled ‘LTTE’, it has a tagline of ‘One man’s terrorist, another man’s freedom fighter’.

Many Indian filmmakers have explored events around the tragic elimination of Rajiv Gandhi. So what’s special about Ramesh’s project? “What others have shown is not even 10 per cent of the real story. I will present details that none of them has told so far,” claims Ramesh, who was a student at Adyar Film Institute when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated.

He remembers going with his friend to the hospital in which Rajiv’s mortal remains were kept. “As the news of Rajiv’s assassination spread like wildfire, the entire state of Tamil Nadu, including its capital Madras, came to a grinding halt. A chill ran down my spine and I could not settle down to sleep. The situation is still fresh in my memory even after three decades. I posed myself as a media person to see Rajiv’s ‘mutilated’ body in the hospital,” he recollected.

Working on the subject for the past 20 years, Ramesh has gone through thousands of documents. The filmmaker has also visited some 80 real locations where the plot to eliminate Rajiv was hatched. “Asphota unveils a 110-day drama, beginning from the nine member-LTTE cadre landing in Kodiakkarai, on the Indian coast, on the night of the April 30 in 1991 and ends on August 20, 1991, when the assassins gets killed in a hideout in Konanakunte in Bengaluru.”

Ramesh met many officials from Intelligence Bureau (IB) Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), and people who were then associated with the LTTE, both in India and Sri Lanka, to get in-depth details. A year after Ramesh first announced the film, he disclosed that Telugu star Rana Daggubati is coming on board to back the web series. The makers announced that Telugu star Venkatesh may essay the role of C B I Director R Karthikeyan, who headed the Special Investigation Team (SIT) that probed the case and planned to bring the versatile Vijay Sethupathi on board to play LTTE chief Prabhakaran.

So why did the film not progress after that? “The process of making the film never stopped,” says Ramesh, pointing at papers, documents, photographs, copies of books, and video recordings related to the subject. “In the last four years, I have recorded interviews of over 300 people, including three siblings of Prabhakaran in Canada, India and Denmark. I have visited Sri Lanka six times, besides visiting Canada and USA thrice,” he says.

“For some reason, the project did not take off and unfortunately, the agreement between Rana and I got annulled,” regrets Ramesh, with a wry smile.

The pandemic further delayed the film’s prospects. But Ramesh now doesn’t see any further obstacles for his film. “The project set to take off with Netflix and Viacom18 keen on working with me. I have given them a power-point presentation on the web series. The scale of my project is big with each episode likely to cost Rs 5 to 10-crore. I want Nawazuddin Siddiqui to essay the role of Shivarasan and I am hunting for a suitable actor to portray Prabhakaran,” he says.

Interestingly, Ramesh’s daughter Vijeta, a graduate of Rangayana Theatre Repertory, will essay the character of Subha, who was with Dhanu, the human bomb that blew up Rajiv Gandhi. The total footage of the project will be 100 hours.