Luckily the teeth were unswallowed and the shooting resumed after she got a new set. There was panic in the sets when everyone thought she swallowed it and she was taken for an X-Ray. She had lost her milk teeth at the time and was wearing an artificial set, which went missing one day. There were many misadventures on the set, Sonia says.
Mothers of the four children watching anxiously from outside the set I was also very comfortable with Dalip Tahil, the Bollywood actor who played my dad," she says. “I have no idea how I did it but I spoke to them for long hours in whatever English I knew back then. That’s the stereographer of the film David Schmier. The 3D lens was brought from the US by David uncle and Deborah aunty, Sonia says. That much work had gone into perfecting the shots. The 30 days they had planned for became 75 days. “I was also the only female actor, the only other woman character – my mother – was a painting on the wall! I remember being treated like a princess.” Kuttichathan was the first film where she played a prominent role – till then it was as one among the kids in a movie. “Maybe because my life is so interconnected to it or maybe because people kept talking about the film all these years, I remember everything about it,” Sonia says on a call from Chennai.
But like Old Rose would surprise her young audience in the movie Titanic, remembering an old, old tale, Sonia tells you as many details as a seven-year-old would have grasped back then. She was too little then and I thought she’d hardly remember any of it. Only Sonia, one of the lead child actors of the movie, spoke. Team behind Kuttichathan (captioned within the picture) ‘I remember everything’: Sonia There seems to be an unwritten protocol among all those who worked in that magical team – writer Raghunath Paleri, art director Sheker, all pointed to the director. And beyond a point, you have to respect a person’s space and assume that they wouldn’t be interested in a story.īut without Jijo’s comments, neither his producer brother Jose (he and Appachan were producers of Kuttichathan), nor his then Assistant Director TK Rajeev Kumar – who is now a respected filmmaker, would talk. But he has sadly been unavailable through days, without any response to the messages or calls. It would be great to speak to Jijo about all of it. But this was 1984, when a phone was an object with a long twirling cable fixed to a spot and computers were funny looking little boxes in another country. Yes, yes, you might raise a brow and muse what the big deal is, you see that all the time – now. The drunks at the bar brush most of it away as their drunken stupor until they see a little girl single-handedly raise her grownup dad from the floor and walk away (they don’t see Kuttichathan lifting him from the other end).
Most of the humour comes from the stunned reactions of the adults who cannot understand what’s going on – a glass of whiskey moving away (Kuttichathan loves his drink), another drained out of the last drop, a door opening on its own. The movie is short, so the magical journey they have begins right away – the earlier mentioned stunts, and certain bar scenes that are especially funny. He is invisible to everyone else but the three kids. Kuttichathan appears in the form of a boy (Aravind) as the children desire, in a white dhoti. That’s when they accidentally release the Kuttichathan – goblin – from a jar in which an evil sorcerer (Kottarakkara Sreedharan Nair) has trapped him to help hunt for treasure. And now he is coming back again with a script for the first film that Mohanlal will direct, Barroz. In 2001 he made a brief return to cinema with Magic Magic, another 3D film. Both films were made by the Navodaya Studio and Appachan – Jijo’s dad – was the producer. He made two landmark films – no exaggeration here – in the gap of two years and then whoosh, disappeared. Jijo is, if you have bothered searching about him, an enigma himself. Quite a few people who worked for the film did not wish to talk about it unless its director, Jijo Punnoose, spoke first. Here comes the strange part of the story. But writing about it with memories of the team that made it would be so refreshing, we thought. An article was floating about the internet on the actor who played the title role, now working as a leading advocate in Kochi. Not that we woke up thinking of writing about Kuttichathan 36 years and one month after its release.