On the set of what would become the highest-grossing Malayalam film ever made, Girish AD walked away from the crowd and sat down in a corner of himself.

They were shooting a reunion scene. The loud machinery of a big film moved around him and he did not stop it. A tightening came in his chest and he waited it out, told nobody standing next to him.

It was sort of a panic attack, he says very casually. He sometimes hates the mechanical process of directing, and says, some mornings all he could see is the day’s problems stacked at the foot of the bed, so much so that he does not want to get up and go to the shoot.

Story continues below.
Subscribe to see fewer ads.

Meet Malayalam industry’s biggest hitmaker. The man whose films people drive out to watch in theatres four to eight times. He never went to a film school. He learned the work by making short films.

Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, his latest, made for a reported Rs 25 crore, crossed Rs 300 crore worldwide in 24 days and passed Lokah to become the highest-grossing Malayalam film ever made. By reported estimates the four films he has directed have cost under Rs 100 crore together and earned more than Rs 500 crore. Prithviraj has called him, simply, a genius.

Girish, however, waves it all away and holds on to his self-image of being extraordinarily ordinary. If he is a genius then everyone is, he says.

It does not read like the practised humility a director puts on after a hit. He drives a Benz now and is building a house, past that not much has changed. He is still happiest with his old friends, or at home with his wife, he says, the way it was before any of this.

Story continues below this ad

He is so unused to being in the spotlight that for much of our on-camera interview he sits scratching at the soil with a twig. We were beside the raised ring of earth around a tree, outside a school courtyard next to the church where he shot some of the most talked-about scenes in Bethlehem Kudumba Unit. His hands kept moving, as if nervous and unsure of where to put them.

“I’m not a hero,” he said.

But isn’t everybody a hero in at least their own world?

Not in the case of him or his friends, he says. “There are other people for that.”

To his mind, some undeserving prick always gets to be the hero, and the awkward ordinary guy would stand there swooned over by him.

Story continues below this ad

It is exactly what he puts on screen. His heroes are rarely the ones who walk into a scene knowing what they want. They are the boys on the kalunku, the Malayali term for the low culvert wall by the road governments across India build that come to be occupied by loafers, watching the day go past.

They are ones who get rejected and do not recover from it in time because a queue of further embarrassments wait for them for the rest of the day. Even the competent man, as a Girish AD hero, freezes when a woman says she likes him and ponders: Me? You sure? Have you thought about this properly?

Old Malayalam cinema might have made the boy on the culvert ogle the girls going by. Girish takes the menace away and keeps the shyness. Around him he puts other boys like him, and they form a bond over being losers, and together they are funnier and warmer than the ones who walk in confidence. The sure ones end up looking a little alone in his movies.

The lead in his first film, he says, came to him as a wish to portray a useless fellow that he all too knows from his own life and his friends. “Even a useless fellow also has to live, no,” he says.

Story continues below this ad

Despite a decade in which Malayalam cinema has been celebrated for its realism and has also found room for scale, star vehicles, and genre muscle, Girish AD’s run has been built on something smaller and easier to miss.

His films stand on the relatability of the script and on a light touch that does not take itself too seriously. Not as a rebuke to the rest of the industry. As one more register inside it. What he brought back, more than invented, is a popular kind of movie that had thinned out: the one interested in what is left after the big plot has been taken out, the way the older, widely watched Malayalam films were. This perhaps needs some explaining.

Sit a man at a laptop and ask him to write the Netflix one-line for an old Sreenivasan film and he might struggle. The plot could be running in four directions around four people and pulling one out cheats the rest.

Sandesham is about a retired railway man who comes home to witness his two sons fight over politics. A Priyadarshan comedy, almost always, started with one small mistaken thing which snowballed into chaos. But those films were all bigger than that.

Story continues below this ad

People go back to them for the faces and the jokes and the pile-up of small situations, until they start recognising their own street in them.

Even the mass movies in Malayalam were different from the ones made across the borders. The Mammootty and Mohanlal spectacles, where the stars were in slow motion, hurling one punch dialogue after another, dispatching one villain after another, had a wound under all the show.

Mangalassery Neelakandan in Devasuram is an arrogant man brought low, and you are meant to feel the fall through the woman who loves him. Then came the Dileep films, in early 2000s, the so-called common man pulled to the centre, his schemes and his wanting mostly played for laughs.

Girish came up in another universe, part of a generation that arrived on cable and in downloaded torrents and argued in Malayalam Facebook groups like Cinema Paradiso about what constitutes art and good cinema.

Story continues below this ad

After 2010s, more of them set out to make movies that provoke thought, put together by the books of Syd Field and Blake Snyder, intact with three acts and a hero’s journey, often dark and moody or at least sure of which genre they sat in.

The makers drew as much from Kusturica as from the comrades next door. It was as much the rise of a new set of angry young men and women, as a fight against the new guard and the older, more established, industry heavyweights.

In the same years that ran star vehicles like Kasaba and Pulimurugan (Mammootty as a fist-happy cop, Mohanlal in full over-the-top flight, respectively), came films that explored the psyche of thieves and the law (Thondimuthalum Dhriksakshiyum), or films that sat with the politics of who gets left behind in the name of development (Kammattipaadam). There was room even for characters like Santosh Pandit, a maverick whose films are directed, scripted, shot, songs sung by and starring Santosh Pandit.

There was, however, one thing that had gone thin. The older version of films being organic, grounded, relatable for their nativity, a boy and a town you could recognise as your own without having lived that exact day, was slower in supply.

Story continues below this ad

Girish AD is currently basking in the success of Bethlehem Kudumba Unit.

Girish missed the ordinary Malayali shown as himself, the regular fellow in a regular town with a regular day to get through, instead of the archetype that went something like Fahadh Faasil in Bermuda shorts, hands in his pockets, staring off at the middle distance, moving through a Kochi lit and dressed up as New York.

He grew up in Chalakkudy. Kochi, a few kilometres away and not all too different, was no unfamiliar place. But when Kochi was shown on screen, he used to wonder which city is this.

For a while, Girish admits, even his eyes drifted abroad. He watched foreign films partly to become the sort of person who had watched them. He wanted to impress some friends who loved those movies and believed for a while that impressing them was the whole of winning. He even fantasised of making it into the award circuits.

What pulled him back to his roots was Tamil cinema from before 2010, the low-budget films of Sasikumar and Mysskin and others. He wanted that sense of a real place for his own films. And then there was Premam.

Story continues below this ad

“It was Premam that made me want, badly, to make a film,” he says. It was full of casual things and places he knew, the Aluva side of Kerala. It made him wonder whether those places had always been that beautiful.

Around then he and a friend were writing a script and went to see Action Hero Biju. It knocked him flat. The police station on screen looked like an actual police station and not one borrowed off a Korean thriller. This, he thought, is what he had to compete with.

I asked if the Vijay songs and the Dhanush lines in his films are built as an answer to the Fincher crowd. He turns it around. The references are just what is there, he says. In his debut, Thanneer Mathan Dinangal, the boys walk into a theatre and a Vijay film is playing, because that is what would be playing. Not Se7en. The song on the bus is an MG Sreekumar number because that was the song on the bus. Not Eminem.

He thinks too much Malayalam cinema has been made since for the people who enjoy recognising where a reference came from. And the men who actually broke the pretence open were not the big producers, but the artistes and the makers themselves, who later turned producers and allowed more such movies to be made. Dileesh Pothan, Fahadh Faasil and Syam Pushkaran, the trio who broke open a new era with Maheshinte Prathikaram, have since put money behind Girish’s films.

But even as he wanted to make movies relatable again, Girish set about breaking the old mould and creating newer ones. Initially, he says, he went looking in his own neighbourhood for the Kerala village that Malayalam cinema sold for decades— traditional, pastoral and missing the urban edge, with a tea shop as its epicentre— he could not find it.

“In other parts of India the gap between a city and a village is huge. In Kerala I have never felt that gap,” he says. A boy studying in a village like Chalakkudy has most of what the city boy has. A few things are missing, maybe, and maybe they were never needed. So he sets his films in Aluva, Angamaly, the Chalakkudy belt, where there is a Lulu Mall down the road but the old ways have not gone anywhere. The line between town and country is not clean here, so he stopped pretending it was.

Around the time Bethlehem crossed Rs 300 crore, Manu Joseph, a Malayali born in Kottayam and raised in Madras, wrote that Kerala is a republic against fun. Beautiful and dignified, and too watchful to let its young stay. He described an army of relatives in every town phoning parents with reports of where their children had been seen, so the children left for Bengaluru.

Girish writes about the ones who did not leave. They sit on the culvert in Angamaly. They crack jokes. They fall in love badly. Even if they leave for Hyderabad, they carry within themselves that Malayali sardonic humour. They show up for the church kudumba unit meeting. He is not answering Manu Joseph with a Kerala version of fun. It is just what he sees, he says.

That may be part of why the films travel. For a Malayali abroad, with an inflation-thinned wallet, half a mind on returning home, there is a particular pleasure in seeing a place you know put on screen without explanation. A student in Brussels or a worker in Perth walks into a theatre playing a Girish AD movie and finds the culvert, the parish, the jokes, the shy boy, the aunt who knows too much, and walks out lighter.

At home the first watch turns into a recommendation. You go again, or take your parents, then tell your friends they have to see it. Then the office crowd, the residents’ association, that one Malayalam-cinema evangelist everyone knows in Chennai. The circle widens with each re-watch.

This is the kind of success the industry only dreamt about for years. I wrote a while ago that everybody loves Malayalam cinema except the producers. Kerala has 3.3 crore people and only a slice of them, 50 lakhs to be exact as per the producers’ association estimates, go to theatres regularly. Even if all of them watch a movie paying Rs 200 per ticket, the total box office collection would be capped at Rs 100 crore. For years the surest way to fill the seats was to put Mohanlal on the poster, and most of the biggest grossers had him, which would mean the cost of production alone would be one third of it.

A still from Girish AD’s Premalu.

But a Girish AD movie like Premalu didn’t have a star of that size, which makes them a different kind of hit. A Mohanlal film promises Mohanlal being Mohanlal. With Girish, the first viewer turns into the salesman who tells the next one, you have to see this. The film becomes something you recruit people into.

How he does it is oddly simple. He keeps the plots simple so the film can rest on the people.

In Super Sharanya, he says for instance, there was a girl who more or less runs the heroine’s life for her who was the sensible and the planner type unlike the heroine. He and his writing partner Kiran Josey were sitting in the latter’s home in Kannur after the release and started wondering what happens to that girl once college ends. She would get a job in a bigger city, Hyderabad maybe, and set about a settled life. And what if she fell in love? Wouldn’t it destroy all her planning?

And what if she fell for her opposite, a boy drifting through Hyderabad aimless after an engineering degree. And what if a polished, entitled boy wanted her too and turned bitter as the two of them grew close?

That became Premalu, made for a reported Rs 8-10 crore, and collected more than Rs 130 crore.

The other thing he likes is to put people in an awkward spot and leave them there. That, he says, is where a lot of the comedy comes from. “Let’s say someone walks out of a room spoiling for a fight, rehearsing the first line he will say, and finds nobody outside. That has always happened to me,” he said.

In Thanneer Mathan Dinangal, a boy who just got rejected by the girl he likes gets home wanting to cry. But then, there are guests arriving at home, his phone is being taken by his brother, his sleeping place given away, the whole evening turning into one long inconvenience. Sometimes, he says, your life becomes a comedy of errors that you land in a spot where you can barely even cry properly. “It won’t work if he cries. This way, we cannot but laugh at him but can also understand his pain.”

That was also Sachin in Premalu. As he gets rejected by the girl, he is also stuck in a xerox shop taking one small indignity after another. The comedy is watching a bad moment get worse while he holds himself together. Until he can’t, that is, and it hits differently than making him simply cry.

For Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, he ran a more risky version of the same experiment. He took Nivin Pauly, the lover boy of a generation, handsome, coming off a long run of flops, the kind of star who at this point might have moved to action, and made him small. Instead of ordinary people behaving like heroes, he had the star behave like an ordinary person.

A still from Girish AD’s Bethlehem Kudumba Unit.

Justin, played by Nivin, is a caterer in his mid-thirties. He is competent and well liked, the man the neighbourhood calls when something breaks. There is a huge pull in a character like that, Girish says, trusted, settled, good-hearted. And when the college girl who has moved in next door, played by Mamitha Baiju, tells him she has fallen for him, he freezes.

“The moment this man does one wrong thing the romance collapses, it turns creepy,” he said. He points to a scene where the girl, alone at home, asks him in, and instead of taking it the way an old hero would, Justin is basically embarrassed and shies away.

He is also a soft nerd, just like Girish. Fixing her laptop, Justin clocks the band on her t-shirt, the one nobody else around her has heard of. She is so enamoured of him, and he barely notices, that she makes the first move. Then the second. He still doesn’t get it until an aunt tells him she is clocking him and he is like really?

“I was lucky to have an actor like Nivin with no ego,” Girish says. Nivin wasn’t afraid of taking on a role that doesn’t take him too seriously, the sort of guy who takes a silly bit role in the movie within the movie, as a waiter in his brother’s short film, and gets shouted at by his brother for getting in on a frame while the short’s shooting, despite him being the producer of that whole vanity project of the brother. The theatre laughs hardest at his humiliation and cries when he finally breaks.

Girish also saw in Nivin a kind of gentle masculinity that he wanted to build into the character. In the trailer, another boy chasing the girl asks her brother what she likes. “Shah Rukh Khan,” the brother says, and they cut to Nivin Pauly. Broad and handsome and with that disarming smile of his’.

Unlike those who take on massy action flicks or big projects after a big success, Girish deliberately goes for incremental growth in career. Ask him why he does not write the slow-burn thriller with a serial-killer story that would get praised at cocktail parties in Delhi-Bombay big studio events, his answer is almost too simple. “I’ve never been chased by a serial killer,” he says, “I would not know how it feels.”

Love and rejection, on the other hand, he knows. “Rejection is hard to fake,” he says, “because everyone in the hall has sat in that same heat behind the face. They catch you the second you pretend.”

He also has a final trick up his sleeve. He runs a second film in your head while the first one plays.

Glikson, the boy who does not get the girl in Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, keeps quoting Dhanush and Vijay at her, which connects to those who were brought up by the whole grammar of the Tamil loser-lover movies of last two decades. The boy does his punchlines to a hall that will get them, and Girish gets his laughs. Then he lets Glikson go home a little wiser about a girl being allowed to choose.

Elsewhere there is a single Mohanlal jump, the kind of sudden leap into a fight that the actor has turned into a signature of his mass roles, slowed down while nothing else in the film moves in slow motion— just to get a laugh out of Suresh Krishna, the actor who has lately found a second life online as Kerala’s “Convincing Star” meme, doing for one second what a big star has done for decades. They shot multiple takes to get this jump correct, which took an entire night, just to get this laugh. A girl turns up in a yellow churidar in the reunion scene and a good part of the hall outside South may not even clock that it is a nod to the Tamil film 96.

You can miss every bit of these and lose nothing. The ones who do catch it go back into the social media groups and comment threads the references and argue about what everyone else missed. It generates a second round of conversation online, with everyone figuring out these easter eggs and rewatching for what they missed the first time. The audience can watch one film for the love story, and another for the social media schooling.

Girish also belongs to a generation of makers in Malayalam who have studied their audience as much as they’ve studied their movies. He splits the Malayali society in two. Most people are honest, he says. A plain film moves them and they will tell you it moved them. Then there is the smaller crowd that cannot admit a simple thing worked on them, that needs the film it praises to be difficult, so the praise says something flattering back about itself.

He and Syam Pushkaran have a phrase for those ones: manassakshi kallanmar, conscience thieves. And then, because he is fair, he says we are all conscience thieves about somebody’s film. Him too. Years ago a Facebook club he wanted into had decided Titanic was a big Hollywood weepie you did not admit to loving, and it was beneath a serious person to do so. He watched it and it felt an ache he could not shake.

His lesson to future filmmakers is simple: the thing that moves the audience may be as big as Titanic, but it is easy to lose sight of it. “Never do.”