I grew up watching films in the ’90s. That was the time when love stories were the most popular genre. Some people have been attacking us online saying Pariyerum Perumal wasn’t a love story, they are going to ruin the original. But what is wrong in taking a love story route? You can talk about different biases and discriminations in society while taking this route. I’ve grown up watching Mani Ratnam and identity and love were never separated in his films. We knew where the girl came from, where the boy came from, and that is how the story was built, and that was the centre of conflict in most of his films. Bombay being the most influential film of my childhood, gave me a perspective about life. It also helped me understand my identity, my roots, my culture. That is what cinema is supposed to do. I would want films to go in that direction. If in the last decade or so we have gone away from that, we need to get back to it. And I’m not saying that every film should deal with inter-caste and inter-faith issues upfront. But the moment you start erasing the identity around the characters to make things more palatable, you lose connection with a large population of the country. People don’t find it relatable. There can be anomalies. There are very popular films that are not dealing with identity issues. But I’ve grown up seeing a society, a country, with people from different faiths and cultures. People may not get married in different sub castes, even if they actually belong to the same larger group. That was such a fascinating thing for me as a filmmaker, especially when I started researching for this film. I realized that I don’t know the society I live in. The more I was trying to understand the society and the deeper I was going into it, I was realising that everything actually works around identity, whether it’s caste identity, religious identity, gender identity and we are just not tackling this in our films. Love story is not a banal genre where two people come together and sing songs. The common route in it has been to deal with the rich and poor divide. It is safer to deal with class but there can be several layers around it. I want those to reflect in the films that I make. Those are the things that I think about as a person, as a filmmaker, and that is why it has reflected in whatever I have made till now, and hopefully, from here on as well.
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