'Cocktail 2' DOP Santhana Krishnan Ravichandran On Shooting Kriti Sanon's Beach Scene: 'It's The Guy's Point Of View'

Written by Luv Ranjan and directed by Homi Adajania, Cocktail 2 is lensed by cinematographer Santhana Krishnan Ravichandran, no stranger to Luv Ranjan’s Cinematic Universes — he also shot Tu Jhoothi Main Makkar (TJMM, 2023), written and directed by Ranjan. Nor is he a stranger to pairing sun-soaked Europe with the cold urban jungle of Gurugram. While TJMM straddled Spain and Gurugram, Cocktail 2 pairs Sicily with Gurugram. Familiarity might be comfortable, but Ravichandran was trying to break out of his pre-set mould.

“How do we not make it look like a typical rom-com? I have only done this genre two-three times, so even I was looking for something different,” Ravichandran tells THR India. 

For one, TJMM was “too tele, too bright, and the colours were loud — but it was the type of bubblegum film that wanted those colours,” Ravichandran notes. For Cocktail 2, instead, "we wanted more grunge.” They didn’t shoot scenes in the usual tourist traps, scouting, instead, for places with edge. "We went hand-held; we avoided tele lenses.”

Cocktail 2, like its spiritual prequel, comically sticks one man (Shahid Kapoor) between two women (Rashmika Mandanna, Kriti Sanon), and despite its Euro-vacation-chic first half, it boomerangs back to India.

The second half is set entirely in Gurugram, which offers a stark contrast, with its drone shots of the concrete and glass skyscrapers scratching the landscape. “The idea was to make Delhi NCR look like London or Hong Kong — the coldness of it — instead of doing it in a bungalow or something.”   

When Ravichandran got the script, the verbosity of it became immediately apparent. “The fun of Luv’s writing was in the dialogue.” But how do you shoot entire scenes that play out as reams of dialogue? 

One way was to block scenes with characters constantly moving or omitting themselves to some action. “A simple example, when Rashmika’s character confronts Kriti’s character — Rashmika is running on the treadmill, Kriti comes and a juice is being made, then one is pouring a cup of coffee. This made it possible for me to cut to the cup of coffee, then, to her face.” 

A scene that caught people’s attention, which was used in the trailer, was at the wedding, where Sanon and Mandanna are screaming at each other, with the camera between them, taking in their full gaze. “See, it is a comedy scene. We wanted to elevate the humour. When we were blocking it, we tried the regular over-the-shoulder shots, but the moment we put the camera in between them, breaking the fourth wall, it felt like they were screaming at the audience, and that was funnier. It just worked.”

Responding to the criticism of the camera framing Sanon’s posterior as she goes for a swim, Ravichandran notes, “A guy is with a girl, who is removing her clothes and going for a swim. What is he seeing? The camera was his point of view. He saw the back of her shoulders, the movement of her hair, and her body as she swims. There is, of course, a way to vulgarise this. But we shot it in a clean way.”

Having shot Kabir Singh (2019), and hit songs like ‘Tauba Tauba’, Ravichandran wants to be a bona-fide commercial cinematographer. “The effort I take for a film which will run and one which won’t is the same. So I might as well work on films that make people come to the theatre."

He is currently shooting Queen 2, directed by Vikas Bahl, starring Kangana Ranaut. “It is the same team, trying to make a film about how a woman breaks free from a patriarchal society. I am almost done with its shoot —just five more days left.”