MANASANAMAHA director Deepak Reddy talks about flashbacks, relationships and the universality of debating where to eat dinner.

You might as well practice saying “Manasanamaha” now. An inspiring and original short film that’s been collecting awards, it’s set for expansion into a feature next. Literally meaning “Salutations to Mind,” it’s not quite as cerebral as all that, though the slightly unreliable narrator Surya (Viraj Aswin) may think it is. As he speaks directly to camera, he remembers failed relationships, assesses them, and attempts to demonstrate how they all began happily, even though in most cases there were plenty of red flags indicating how things would end.


Director Deepak Reddy achieves this effect by showing us the relationship in backwards time. Traveling backwards through the days of the relationship, face gets un-slapped, proposals un-made, and broken items fixed, all via scenes running in reverse. Balletically staged pillow stuffings get sucked back into their casings from their swirls in the air. Steam returns to hot pots. And grave mistakes backtrack to the misunderstandings and bad timing that got things rolling.


Surya never quite comes around to accepting blame, but a clever twist suggests that another side to the story may come out at another time. Possibly in the feature version. This was one of several questions Films Gone Wild had for Reddy. (The conversation has been slightly edited for punctuation and clarity)

1. The key technique in this film — the flashbacks in reverse slo-mo — are so eye-catching that there seems to be more going on than simply reversing a take. Specifically, things like the fireworks and the pillow stuffing flying everywhere feel like balletic choreography down to the smallest particles. Was it just as simple as shooting a take and reversing it? Or is there more technical wizardry than that at work?


When I decided to make this concept into a film, I wanted to tell the entire story backwards and it was supposed to be a music video. But later as the story evolved, it turned out as a short film script.

When I wanted to tell the story literally in reverse, I decided to do a lot of homework and practice; each shot was visually thought out and framed while I was writing it as the film required more visual treatment. To put it simply, I wrote the shots rather than writing a conventional script. Later, we did rigorous pre-production work to check if whatever I visualized is practically possible to shoot and edit. We did storyboarding and test shoots to make it a little easier. The production design,art and actions were planned depending on how they’ll look when the shots are reversed. and CG shots were also planned during the preproduction itself. Some of the parts were improvised during the post.


2. The reverse structure day by day brought a couple of things to mind — the movie 500 Days of Summer, and an Alanis Morissette video that told a story of a relationship in reverse. Did you have specific influences that inspired you to stage most of the narrative this way?


500 Days of Summer is one of my favorite films of all time. It sure has an influence on me. It has a nonlinear structure of telling the story, not exactly in reverse order, but as in random dates of their relationship. I haven’t watched Alanis Morissette’s video. As I am a great fan of 500 Days of Summer, I did send the short to Mr. Marc Webb last year. That was one of the greatest moments of my life when he emailed me saying he loved “Manasanamaha,” and its fresh visual style – [that] the techniques that’ve been used are so much fun.

3. The small bits of animation sprinkled throughout — were they always part of the plan as a way to make transitions more efficient?


The animation was planned to give it a fairytale kind of narrative style, while we were talking about the three women in his life, which basically represent the seasons (Spring, Rainy,Winter). We extended it a bit more and did the sketches, as it was blending well with the visual style of the film and [we] thought they could add great value for the transitions.


4. Do you think Surya will ever be introspective enough to wonder what it is about him that he’s drawn to women whom he inevitably finds complain too much?


As in life, we generally are with people who have complaints about us. But stereotyping all the women he’s been with has to be given a thought. He’ll be introspective about those, but not in the moments of the film. It is in a complete first person narrative where the flaws in him are completely hidden as he’s unapologetic about his actions to the audience. If you can observe the scene with Varsha (from his past), it is his flaw that he doesn’t get to appreciate her and is playing the video game on his mobile when she’s expecting it from him.


5. We understand you’re working this into a longer feature. Would that version be divided between male and female points of view, as the ending of the short hints? Or would it be all Surya’s story? Will the animation feature more frequently?


it’ll be all that you haven’t seen in the short. It’ll be a whole new story of Surya and his relationships, with different perspectives too! The animation won’t be more frequent. It will be limited.

6. The debate on where to eat, and who chooses, is maybe the most universal thing I’ve ever seen in a movie that I didn’t realize was universal. So approximately how many times would you say you personally have that conversation?


Hahaha!! This is the most universal thing that has happened to me so many times; that is the reason I could just put it so effortlessly in the film as I felt if that happened to me a hundred times, it would probably have happened at least once to every man in the world.


7. Inquiring minds must know: what kind of crunchy nuts were in that ice cream?


Hahaha! Do we really have to care? Cause she hasn’t had it, after all.


8. Have you or anyone you know ever used that lip-bite pick-up line? Did it work?


No! The only scene which hasn’t even remotely happened to me or any of my friends in the story was that one. I just wanted to show Surya was dynamic and an alpha in the beginning of the relationship who turned out sober later after he dated Chaitra!


9. Popcorn or candy?


Popcorn always 🙂