Producer Abhijith Babuji: I knew Chinna Chinna Aasai was not a typical commercial entertainer

A city, a story, and a leap of faith

The film’s origins trace back to a place rather than a script. “The biggest one was Varanasi,” he says of his reasons for producing it. “Varanasi has a very personal connection with me. Whenever I’ve gone through a difficult phase in life, visiting Varanasi has somehow helped me find clarity.” When his college batchmate and now debutante director Varsha Vasudev narrated a story about two people in their fifties over the course of a single day in that city, he recounts connecting with it instantly. Indrans, he felt, was the only actor who could carry that emotional register. Madhoo’s casting brought its own resonance, marking her return to Malayalam cinema after a long gap. Abhijith knew what he was getting into. “I knew this wasn’t a typical commercial entertainer,” he admits. “But I believed it had enough emotional strength to connect with audiences. Even if there had been a small financial loss, I felt it would still have been worth making because it’s a film I genuinely believed in.”

That conviction met a far messier reality once production began. Abhijith, who describes himself as “essentially a businessman”, ploughed roughly a decade’s worth of earnings into the film, money that could easily have gone into real estate. “One thing I learnt very quickly is that a film’s budget never remains what you initially estimate,” he says. “If you start with a budget of 100, you should expect to finish somewhere around 130 or 140.” Shooting entirely on location in Varanasi, a city with none of the conveniences filmmaking usually depends on, tested that budget further still. His team spent nearly two weeks scouting before the shoot proper began, physically walking every location. “We traced the characters’ journey step by step to understand where the camera should be placed, how equipment could be moved and how each sequence could be executed efficiently,” he recalls. The discipline paid off and the film wrapped in 28 days.