Karthik Subbaraj's 10th feature film, Dorothy, reminded him of the reason he became a filmmaker.
Speaking to THR India in an exclusive interview, Subbaraj said the shift in scale and working method on Dorothy brought him back to something essential. "There's a house which we often show in the film. One day I was shooting there, and I somehow felt like this is very real, these are actually real people, and I'm just keeping a camera. Achieving that gave me a real high. This is what filmmaking is." He explained that he had always enjoyed the cinematic drama of his bigger productions, but that Dorothy gave him an equal and different kind of excitement. "This is why I came into filmmaking."
Subbaraj described the process as a return to an indie mode of working, after his previous projects like Retro (2025) and Petta (2019). His own team, who had spent the last five to six years working on his high-budget productions, found it difficult to adjust to this at first. "I used to call them and ask, 'What are you all — high budget ADs?'" he laughs.
The change was felt even with respect to the technical aspects of the making the film, right down to the equipment that could be afforded. "I did Retro and Petta, and with respect to the technicalities, like the camera, equipment and lighting, you got whatever you asked for because those are high-budget films and those actors have a market. But in this, we've put a constraint, because when you're making a film like this, you can't go beyond budget such that it affects the film."
Subbaraj also pointed to the masters of Tamil cinema — J Mahendran, Balu Mahendra, K Balachander, Bharathiraja — as filmmakers whose work served as inspiration while making Dorothy. "This film has complete inspiration from all the masters of Tamil cinema. They have all made something like this before."
His further explained that today, the separation between what wins at festivals and what works for mainstream audiences, has been artificially constructed. The clearest example he reached for was Rajinikanth's 1978 film Mullum Malarum, directed by J Mahendran. "If you see that story and you just remake it how he has done, with the same kind of shots, that would be a Cannes winner or something like that. And that film was a blockbuster hit in Tamil cinema at the time. The Tamil audience liking this kind of film doesn't mean the festival audience would reject it."
Dorothy had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and is now in theatres.