Sriram Raghavan breaks down Merry Christmas: Katrina Kaif, teddy bear, murder and alternate climax which changed week before filming

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In a spoiler-full interview with Indianexpress.com, Sriram Raghavan talks about how he wrote Merry Christmas based on the French novel Le Monte-charge (Bird in a Cage), breaks down his hardest scene and reveals how his inventive no-dialogue climax was achieved.

Edited excerpts:

What’s with the cat in Merry Christmas? There was also one in Andhadhun. Am I missing more from your films?

No it is just these two. I love cats, I used to have a cat myself. In Merry Christmas, I just wanted the beginning to have things we don’t see often or don’t use. So, the post box, a cat sitting on top of it, someone scrawled ‘Merry Christmas’ on a wall, basically to give you a feeling that you are in a real and yet unreal place.

Did you watch the film first or read the book?

The book. If I watch the film based on a book, then I am never going to make my version because I feel someone has already gone through that adventure. Book is a movie in your head. When I read the book, I thought it was so tender. It is a beautiful French novel–I read a translation of course–but many things are different. I could visusalise the potential of a film while I was reading it; two people who meet each other one night. I read the book and then I came to know there is a film available, but we had already begun ours.

The movie is called Paris Pick-Up?

Yes. The culture is different there, so the context is more like what would be today a Tinder date. But Merry Christmas goes back in time, in a different era altogether, a time of innocence.

What about the book jumped at you?

It is a very slim novella and I got hooked right from the first line of the book: How old does a man have to be to not feel like an orphan when his mother is dead?  It is unlike a thriller, more about a person’s angst.

Vijay’s character does mention about the pain of loss when Katrina and him are walking back from the cinema hall…

Yes and there is a simple shot when he is lying on his mother’s bed and her specs are there, hopefully it evokes something in people when they see that shot. I read the book in 2016. I have a copy right here with me. (Sriram then opens the drawer and shows the book, which is full of markings made with pencils, pens, paragraphs highlighted, tiny notes mentioned in the pages to remember the important points). I read it before Andhadhun.

The film is not set in Pune–where your last two films were set–but Mumbai, why?

I was initially thinking to set it in Pune, it is my city and I love it. But because of COVID restrictions, nobody was willing to open their doors with regards to locations. On top of that, to go with a unit and the possibility of somebody falling sick… We thought Goa and Kolkata as well, because Christmas is celebrated there in a grand way. Eventually because of convenience we chose Mumbai, but it is also a city I have grown up in and I love it. The pre Mumbai Bombay was beautiful, only the Maruti car had just come so the streets were not populated, there were no cars blocking everything. Which is why I wanted to back to that era.

It is a deeply romantic film; did you begin writing it with that intention?

Actually no, and that’s the funny part. Initially I thought this is a thriller and let me just focus on the thriller aspect of it. But there is a big reveal in the film, which can only happen in a movie. It is plausible, but not commonly done. To kill someone, then do this elaborate planning, execution… I thought this is a dangerous thing I am doing. This is not a thriller, I have to focus on the characters. Once you start focusing on that, they assume a life of their own. That became the focus.

Many years ago when I had started the film, I wanted it to be a 90-minute film without an interval. But then I also felt, there will be a lot of conversations in the film, like in Before Sunrise and the entire trilogy. There is a French filmmaker, Eric Rohmer, who I have thanked in the film, he also makes films about ordinary people talking but they are so watchable. Many people here may not have the patience to watch his films, but I have seen many of them in the Film Institute and I also have a t-shirt! That’s when the focus started shifting, about people, conversations and of course, falling in love.

Where do the names of Katrina and Vijay’s characters come from?

So usually, we pull of stunts of naming our characters popular character names. Here there is a character called Rosie, to hint at that unfaithful wife thing but at the end of the day we thought let’s keep it simple- Maria and Albert, the former I think is the name in the book also.

Where did the teddy bear come from? It is a stunning imagery– a lady with her daughter walks alone at night holding a teddy bear.

I don’t know if this is there in the book. But it came pretty early in the scripts. There is a scene in the cinema hall when the kid wants to use the restroom and wants to lug the bear, but the mother requests the man to look after it. It is an ice-breaker between them, when she comes back and he tells her the teddy bear tried to run away. I just loved the imagery as you mentioned. If you notice, the bear actually grows in size!

Vijay’s character jokes about that as well!

There is no reason for that, people may think it is a continuity error! This is thought out, but not analytical. There was one review which mentioned that the growing teddy represents Maria and the kids’ growing woes. It was a wonderful theory, but I didn’t think of it that way.

Which scene was the hardest to crack?

The flashback one, where she demonstrates what happened, how that was done. Initially there was a proper scene– the guy gets up, there is a scuffle, which we also shot. But I thought this was not required. Because if you see, the film they watched together was Pinocchio, so there was a theme of lies and falsehoods running all through. So when she says, ‘This is what he did, this is what happened’, you have to take her word. Vijay is a stranger, and we wanted viewers to be him. Do you believe her when she is narrating a story? That’s what we wanted.

When Katrina and Vijay start opening up about their lives at her house, it was a very Ittefaq moment– two strangers in a strange situation sharing this intimacy.

Yes that’s what the intention was. When I was chatting with Thiyagarajan Kumararaja (director of Super Deluxe) and narrating him the story, he was the one who gave me the idea to make the film in Tamil also. If you look at the larger picture, she takes him home, they have a drink, they go out and come back. But then we said what if we use real time here, like she would put the kid to bed, they will have a drink, start chatting and keep talking for 15-20 minutes. We thought it would be a good challenge to do this in real-time. It was part of the design.

What was the direction to Katrina? She remains mysterious, you do find her fishy but are unable to pin point what exactly she is up to.

When I gave her a narration and the book to read, she just fell in love with the story. After that it was just fairly simple, where she waa adding her bits. I told her that whatever you say, people will have to take it in face value. Whether they believe your character or don’t. In thrillers and especially coming from me now, the lingering feeling is, ‘There is something more to this.’ I was hoping the viewers would speculate and start writing their own scripts in their heads.

Sanjay Kapoor’s character is a truly funny guy. How did you develop that part?

It was a lot of fun to work with him. The line where he says, ‘Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyu Aata Hai?’ That was a movie of that time! He was very participative throughout. Of course, the ring and other touches were in the final script, but it is not in the book.

At what point does the book end?

When Albert says he will not burn the wallet but give it to the church. Then he goes home and while opening the door he realises that he still has the wallet. When he goes to the church, the cops are waiting for him. They see where he is going and watch him put the wallet in the lost and found box. It was not cinematic.

Can you talk about the climax and the decision to have no dialogues in it?

We had the scene with dialogues! The climax is different from the book. The book ends somewhere else, and very tamely. It was not cinematic enough for me to use. So I knew I had to crack the end. In our script, we had dialogues, including this line which is not there anymore when the cop says: ‘Either I have witnessed a miracle on Christmas day, or you have been lying all through.’ And then hell starts breaking lose and whatever you deduce from the end happens.

Four days or a week before the shoot, we had our work ready, with dialogues in Hindi and Tamil. Suddenly from the South team (Thiyagarajan Kumararaja’s team), they were writing the Tamil dialogues and giving major ideas for the film, I got feedback: What if we go dialogue-less in the end? For a second, I thought this was incredible and it indeed was. It is not like I shot the scene with the background music on set. The idea was that there would no dialogues and no music as well!

It is an old police station, so the scene would have the sound of the ceiling fan, swinging doors, typewriter. But my editor Pooja (Ladha Surti), who was also the co-writer of the film and was on set, asked me to come and check when she got the material. In my head, I thought the music will start at the last shot, just when the title comes. But when I saw what she had done, I was blown away.

The background score is straight from a 70s Hindi film.  Even the soundtrack has an unusual combo: Pritam and Varun Grover.

Daniel B George is someone I have worked with since Johnny Gaddaar and Pooja also has great music sense. It is fantastic what Daniel scored. With Pritam, I had met him by chance and wanted to narrate the story to him. He is also from FTII and we have known each other for very long. He just loved the story and told me he will do music for the film. I thought Varun and Pritam will be an interesting mix. Varun was already doing something with Matchbox, so it worked it. They are an odd couple, and I wanted that.