The Oscar winning sound designer Resool Pukkuty, who won hearts of millions for his work in the Oscar winning movie ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘, is now back with his first Indian movie after Slumdog’s Success. The movie titled ‘Pazhassi Raja‘ will be released in 5 different languages including Hindi and English. The movie features stalwarts like Mammoothy, Sarath Kumar and many others. The story is by M T Vasudevan, and music is graced by the great Illayaraja.
The movie, Pazhassi Raja dates back to 1797 and is about a King who probably is one of the first ones to ignite the light of freedom movement in our country, even before the revolt of 1857. Interestingly, the movie will be Resool’s first movie in his mother tongue- Malayalam for which he is designing the sound. He was so impressed with the movie that he decided to be a part of the movie at any cost even while the movie was at its postproduction stage He says, “I got Pazhassi Raja when the shooting of the movie was complete. And like most movies in the south, Pazhassi raja was shot entirely without music. It came as a challenge to create music for a movie that doesn’t belong to this era.”
Understanding the grandeur of this epic, Resool decided to recreate the sound of the 18th century era using all natural elements. “It is a period film and we live in the contemporary world. It was difficult to recreate every detail of the sound for scenes from the battlefields and for the footsteps of the Brahmins who didn’t wear leather footwear. So I took a team of 200 men to the actual locations of the movie and recreated the sounds,” says Resool.
39-year-old Resul Pookutty is an Academy Award and BAFTA Award winning Indian film sound designer, sound engineer and sound editor and mixer. He won the Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing for the film Slumdog Millionaire. A 1995 graduate from Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, he has previously worked in some of the most high profile Indian films such as ‘Black’, Saawariya’, ‘Gandhi, my father’ and ‘Ghajini’.
