Exclusive! Jeethu Joseph: Several locations for Mohanlal’s Ram were cancelled after Queen Elizabeth’s death

Director Jeethu Joseph is one of the rare few filmmakers who have managed to complete about 90% of his movies well ahead of the planned schedule. But his current film Ram, which has Mohanlal and Trisha Krishnan in the lead, is an outlier. The movie’s schedule had been in disarray since the worldwide pandemic in 2020, and even though the team resumed shooting in August 2022, the challenges never ceased.

In a recent interview with OTTPlay, the filmmaker opened up about how his previous experience of working in films, even in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu industries, didn’t prepare him much for Ram, which has the UK, Tunisia, Morocco and Israel as some of its foreign locations.

Also read: Exclusive! Mohanlal’s Ram had to be a duology as it wasn’t practical to make a 5-hour-long film: Jeethu Joseph 

“Ram is different from the movies I have done so far,” he says. “How we work in India is entirely different from the foreign style of filmmaking. There are challenges that come up because of that too. Foreigners only work for 8 hours and they are not available on Sundays; we work round the clock. So, I am not able to shoot the film at the same speed as my previous movies.”

The filmmaker, however, remarks that it was a new experience for him. “Next time, when I do such a movie, I will plan based on the experience I have gained,” he explains.

The working schedules weren’t the only reasons the film is taking him much longer to complete. “For instance, the Queen had died just four days before we were set to shoot the film. Once she passed away, a lot of our locations were cancelled for the wake. In India, once the location is cancelled, we can get it scheduled for the next day. But in the UK, you will have to apply for permission again and wait during the processing time. So, we will have to fly back to the UK to shoot the portions we couldn’t. It’s not easy to shoot abroad,” he says.

The team has now wrapped up its Tunisia schedule and is headed to Morocco next. The film, which also has Indrajith Sukumaran, Adil Hussain and Samyuktha Menon, also has a schedule in India and Israel remaining along with the pending portions in the UK.