Art director Mohandas Pallakkottil recreated a flood for Malayalam movie 2018

‘Everyone is a hero’, goes the tagline in Jude Anthany Joseph’s blockbuster 2018. The tagline is true in the case of the cast and crew too. One of the frontrunners in the team is art director Mohandas Pallakkottil who worked on the sets of the film for four months and several months before that to convince producers that a movie on the flood of 2018 that devastated several places in Kerala could be made for the screen.

Thrilled at the success of the film that is creating new box office records for the Malayalam industry, Mohandas maintains it was teamwork and the theme of the film that brought in viewers to theatres.

Although Jude and Mohandas had talked about the subject in 2019, they took time to plan how they would go about shooting the flood and the rescue operations. That is when the pandemic played spoilsport. But the cast and crew overcame several hurdles to make the film a reality.

A poster of the film 2018.
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Special arrangement

Budget constraints demanded that the crew turn to innovative practices to film the movie. Mohandas says that contrary to what many viewers think, VFX was used only in a few scenes. Prior to the shooting, Jude, producer Anto Joseph and Mohandas had extensive discussions to plan the shoot.

“Initially, Anto chettan told us to rent a house and start working on miniature houses to show how I planned to show the water rushing in or seeping into the houses and the rising water levels. By then, we had selected a vacant plot in Vaikom as the main location,” he says.

Most of the frames of the flood were shot on sets put up on a 22-acre site at Maravanthuruthu in Vaikom, 30 kilometres from Kottayam. Prior to the shoot, the art director had made 45 miniatures of the entire set and showed the producers how they planned to show the deluge. That convinced the producers.

Jude Anthany Joseph and Tovino Thomas on the sets of 2018 
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SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

And that was when the pandemic struck. Mohandas recounts with a chuckle that they thought the pandemic would be controlled within a week or two and went ahead with the schedule of the film. One of the challenges was finding a cinematographer. “Many of them were unsure of how the whole project could be shot and there were many night shots as well.”

Attention to detail

He used the time during the lockdown to design and fine tune the sets for the film. Jude and he went over each frame and finalised how each would be filmed. In the meantime, Mohandas worked on Jude’s Sara’s.

In November 2020, when the director decided to start shooting, Mohandas recalls how he was in the midst of big films such as Prithiviraj’s Kaduva and Bro Daddy, Priyadarsan’s Appatha, and Manju Warrier’s Ayisha.

“Nevertheless, during breaks in the shooting, we started working on the film — scouting for locations, holding discussions, and still searching for a cinematographer. That was when our DOP Akhil George joined us. Tovino put him in touch with us as they had worked together in Kala and Forensic. It was the same with editor Chaman Chacko and music director Nobin [Paul].”

That was also around the time producer Venu Kunnappilly came on board as a producer and then there was no looking back.

By April, the shooting started and it was completed on November 12, 2022. The time the team got for pre-production was put to good use to fine tune each sequence and scene and that helped during the actual shooting of the film.

After filming some general scenes, they decided to shoot a rescue sequence, as work on the tank and the sets were not completed and the onset of monsoon created a different set of problems.

On cloud nine

“Since Tovy (Tovino Thomas) was on the sets, Jude decided to film the scene that shows Anoop, Tovino’s character, help airlift a pregnant woman. We had already made the helicopter and it was kept in a godown owned by Anto chettan. We had planned a six-day shoot but it took us nine days to shoot the sequence.”

A few days later, the filming of the deluge began at Maravanthuruthu and they shot a scene of an elderly woman being taken to a shelter in a huge uruli (a large flat-bottomed vessel) while the set was being readied for another shot. “Akhil had kept the camera inside the uruli for that frame. That’s when he felt that it was a great idea to keep the camera in an uruli to shoot the scenes in the water. Since then, the camera was mounted inside an uruli for several shots focussed on the people trapped in the water and their rescue.”

Once the sequence involving the helicopter was canned, the team knew the project was on track. By then the set was completed.

Some of the members of the cast and crew of 2018.
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SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

Fourteen houses with different facades were made. So, the same house could be turned around with the help of a crane to make it look like another house. In the early part of the film, the ‘houses’ were placed outside the tank; to show the water rising, they were placed in the tank using a crane.

“A two-acre tank was built on the location and it was filled with water. That was where we shot the underwater scenes once we began shooting the flood,” explains Mohandas.

“There were about four different places where we had to show the water rising — the frame where Asif comes to the rescue; a scene that depicts Tovino moving in to save people; frames that shows them saving lives and the place where they reach the people to safety. Each scene was shot in four different sets.”

One of the most difficult shots was one that depicted Sudheesh, his wife and their injured son trapped in neck-deep water in their home. A terrifying frame shows the rush of water into their home, through doors and windows till it almost reaches the ceiling. The family is perched on a table and trying to breathe by craning their neck above the rising water level.

“Shot under water, Sudheesh chettan’s house was filled with water. Then we took the ‘house’ and put it in the tank and filled it with water to show the flood water gushing into the house through doors and windows. After that we put it under water to show their precarious condition. We had to keep changing the homes at least 10 times to shoot those sequences. It was challenging and required tremendous effort.”

However, he reiterates that all the effort was worth it now that the film is such a huge success. “I had worked on Mamankam, which bit the dust at the box office. So, the producers were worried about 2018. We are all relieved and thrilled that the movie is creating waves.”

In the meantime, Mohandas is busy with the work on Mohanlal-starrer L2:Empuraan, the sequel of Lucifer, directed by Prithviraj.