PremiumAnamadheya Ashok Kumar director Sagar Kumar: I wrote the film for Kishore sir
Debutant director Sagar says that he would not have made Anamadheya Ashok Kumar without Kishore. A murder mystery, the film will be in theatres on February 7
Last Updated: 06.23 PM, Feb 06, 2025
A news article that caught debutant filmmaker Sagar Kumar’s attention, gave him the seed idea for a story, a synopsis of which he sent to actor Kishore. The accompanying message read, ‘Sir, if this interests you, I will develop it further. Otherwise, there is no point in me making this film’. Although Kishore was busy at the time, he responded that there was merit in the idea and asked Sagar to meet him the next time he was back home in Bengaluru.
For Sagar, an IT professional-turned-director, the challenge then was that he could not find anyone to back the project and telling his leading man that it would be a self-funded. Kishore, interestingly, did not back out and that’s how Anamadheya Ashok Kumar got rolling. “After I approached Kishore sir for Anamadheya Ashok Kumar, I had shown him a short film I’d made, called Varadi, which, I think gave him the confidence to work with me,” says Sagar.
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Anamadheya Ashok Kumar is a murder mystery revolving around the death of a high-profile individual and the subsequent interrogation of a person who could be the perpetrator or an innocent bystander who got caught in the middle of a crime. Harshil Koushik, of Achaar and Co fame plays the cop, while Kishore is the journalist who is suspected of having carried out the attack.
The process of making Anamadheya Ashok Kumar
In the 100-page screenplay, Sagar says that Kishore marked out only two lines that he thought were politically incorrect. “Otherwise, he said we were good to go and we were ready to go on floors in 2022. We’d fixed a schedule, in which Kishore sir would join us on Day 3 and then stay on to complete it, having allotted 10 days for the film. But after shooting for 2 days, I had a personal emergency and had to call off the schedule,” he says.
Thereafter, getting Kishore back was the challenge, as his schedule was chock-a-block, and Sagar, who’d not given up on his IT job had a 6-month stint in Germany on work. “When I returned to India, I met Kishore sir and showed him what we had shot in those 2 days. He asked me to sort out pre-production and get back to him, after which he gave the dates we needed to finish the film. We shot most of the film in about 10 days, split in two segments, with a minor portion involving Kishore sir pending. It was a good month and a half later that he could join us again, but in the meantime, I had finished editing the film,” says Sagar.
Casting choice of Harshil Koushik as CI Athirath
Given that Anamadheya Ashok Kumar was written for Kishore, his casting was, of course, a no-brainer. But how did Harshil come into the picture? “Truth be told, the plan was to have Prakash Raj sir in the police officer’s role and have him face-off with Kishore sir. It was just impossible to even connect with him, though. I also realised that handling the dates of both Kishore sir and Prakash Raj sir would have been a logistical nightmare. If I had both on board, it would have taken me 1 and a half years to shoot it and hence I decided to go with a relatively new face, if we can’t get anybody else,” explains Sagar
The filmmaker considered many other actors, but nothing panned out and with only 3 days to go for the schedule to start, he called Harshil for someone’s number. “Harshil was meant to do another role, but then asked me why I wasn’t considering him to play CI Athirath. After Achaar and Co, Harshil had bulked up and was sporting a 6-pack abs physique. He’d look good in a police uniform and can act too,” he says.
Anamadheya Ashok Kumar opens in theatres on February 7 and gets a limited release, amid several other movies this week and the biggie, Vidaamuyarchi. “Getting audiences to theatres is very difficult and for a film like ours, word-of-mouth publicity matters. But even if that is positive, people may just prefer to wait for it to drop on some OTT platform. While making the film we knew that our cast may not exactly be crowd-pullers, but the hope is that the content clicks with audiences. When we began the project, there were a few distributors who'd shown interest, but by the time we were ready for release that avenue was not there. Those who were still available asked for a lot of money, which we did not have, as well as some changes to the film that would make it more commercially viable, which I was not ready to do,” Sagar signs off.