On the occasion of Manjummel Boys turning a year old, the makers released a production design behind-the-scenes video to give fans a sense of how complicated it was to mount a film of the scale we see now.
In the video, writer-director Chidambaram says he felt immense respect for the makers of the 1991 film Gunaa — chiefly, director Santhana Bharathi and cinematographer Venu — when taking into account how they managed to shoot it in the real caves in Kodaikanal — now named after the Kamal Haasan-starrer — despite not being in the possession of advanced equipment, as the current generation of filmmakers do.
"The first thing that greeted us in the cave was death," says Chidambaram. "When I descended to the mouth of the cave strenuously and saw the pit he (Sreenath Bhasi's character Subash) slipped in, it was a monkey's skull that welcomed us. The smell there was such. I could see and smell rocks deprived of sunlight for years. When I saw all these, I realised it's impossible to shoot there.
Unlike that film, though, our film takes place entirely in the Guna cave, and even if we did get to shoot it in the caves, it has to be in such a way that we have to be in control of the process. So we realised that the only way to do it is to recreate the Guna caves."
Among the various sets of things that production designer Ajayan Chalissery did to recreate the actual ambience of the place was to collect rocks from different areas of Kodaikanal aside from incorporating real and artificial plants into the set.
The 16-minute-long video is insightful material for filmmaking students and cinephiles curious to understand the fascinating thinking process of some of the most gifted and hardworking technicians in Malayalam cinema.
