Shreyas Chinga: I have changed the edit and BGM to present a new version of David

After years of working as an assistant director, Shreyas Chinga made the transition to lead hero with the film David, a project he’d announced way back in 2017. Back then, a young filmmaker called Bhargav was in the director’s seat, but as the film gears up for its July 21 theatrical release, Shreyas gets credit for direction too. In a quick chat with OTTplay prior to the film’s release, the actor-filmmaker talks to us about the delay in the making and how he came to be the ‘director’ of David, among others.

You’ve been speaking about David for many years now. What happened?

(Laughs) Yes, David was conceptualised a little over half a decade ago. We began shooting on July 17, 2017 and the film was ready and censored way before the pandemic hit. We’d taken the trailer to Cannes in 2019 and managed to sell the world rights, but that deal fell through eventually. And just as we began making plans to release it, the pandemic struck. Around the time, the director, Bhargav, got married and moved to Europe, leaving me as the torch-bearer for the film.

At some point, though, the producer felt that the final output was not up to the mark after all and turned to me wondering what could be done to improve it. The film that is coming out tomorrow is David 2.0, I would say. We have not shot anything afresh. I changed the background score and the edit pattern and since we had time on hand, I did some graphic work to patch up wherever I thought there was a lag. The film is now my vision of how I would have handled it. I have presented David as a big production on a limited budget.

David is a suspense thriller, so it could escape ‘aging’. But have you done anything to ensure it does not look and feel stale?

When we set out to make this film, I knew that as my first venture as a hero, it would take time to take off. Although I have some filmi background (Shreyas’ father is renowned art director Suri), I am a nobody in the industry, which means that you don’t get the kind of support that other star kids get. I wasn’t going to get a red-carpet welcome into the industry. The concept was done to make it timeless, so, even if we release the film three years from now, it will feel new.

One of the biggest changes in the landscape of Bengaluru was the Metro rail and luckily for us, by the time we began shooting, couple of lines were already functional. Barring the fact that the iPhones used are not the latest models, the film does not look stale at all.

Why have you chosen to release the film on July 21, in competition with half a dozen other Kannada movies, as well as the Hollywood biggies, Oppenheimer and Barbie?

After the pandemic, there’s been such a massive backlog of films ready to hit theatres that it has become difficult to find a good time to release at any given point. Throughout the year, there are big films coming from other languages that you will have to compete against. In Karnataka, the bigger share of screens is always allotted to the bigger star, even if it is not a Kannada film, because they have the budgets to sustain rentals of single-screen halls and multiplex shows. So, for budding filmmakers and actors, there is never a good time to bring our movies to theatres. We have to make up our mind and release at some point. If we continue to get scared of the market, we will never be in theatres. I had a gut feeling that now is our time and here we are. The agenda is to have a limited release and let word-of-mouth publicity take the film forward. I am not a big hero for audiences to queue up for my film. I know where I stand.

So, what is David about?

It is a whodunit murder mystery, in which the antagonist is the title character. The film has four story arcs, off of which culminate in one track in the search for David.