Interview | Director Krishand On 'The Chronicles of the 4.5 Gang': 'They Thought I Was A Madman…'

Krishand tries to recall the origins of his web series The Chronicles of the 4.5 Gang, the first thoughts of which came to him 12 or 13 years ago. He was a student at IIT Bombay and was obsessed with the hit series Prison Break, salivating at the idea of making a series of high calibre in Malayalam. He envisioned this long before OTT, before it was cool to think of original ideas for series. But it was a chat with a professor at IIT that may have nudged him to write it. “My professor was used to listening to all my script ideas and I feel he must have gotten a bit of tired of them. Even then, all my movies had some outlandish element, either in the form of an alien invasion or some form of warfare. He was the one who urged me to think about my roots and the stories I grew up witnessing.”

Krishand grew up in what he calls a Colony in Thiruvananthapuram, a place where it wasn’t shockingly unusual for someone to get into a life of crime. “It was that chat with my professor. He got me to see the benefits of writing straight from life. At the very least, you can narrow down your data collection. I already had the lived-in experience, and it shortened the time it took to re-imagine something. In his words, I didn’t always have to live with poets just to write a story about them. But you know gangsters.”

His writing was always in detail, even more so when he began to write stories from his own life and the “Chettans I grew up watching.” The gangster story was particularly attractive, and he began to work on the script that finally became 4.5 Gang. “But what I realised about the life of a gangster in India is that it is all quite similar no matter where the story takes place. Most of them come from the same socio-political backdrop and their arcs are also identical when they enter a life of crime. Movies like Gangs Of Wasseypur and Angamaly Diaries released as I was working on this script, and I could see how similar they were.”

The difference, for Krishand, was how he was able to tell his stories. “At one point, I thought of modifying it into a two-part movie format. Somewhere along the line, it was discussed to be made into Tamil. Then right from 2015, I’d been pitching it to OTTs. Finally, it got green-lit in 2020.”

He believes a lot has changed in his script and the way audiences perceive shows like 4.5 Gang. Not only did he rework the script after watching Angamaly Diaries to make it just as entertaining, but he also believes the show would have been better had it released in early 2020. “I’ve tried to update the show every chance I got, but it’s not easy to completely rewrite something you worked on a decade ago. For instance, a show that's being conceived today does not need such long passages for individual characters to get introduced. Right now, the audience will still get it, even if you’re able to show one solid scene to set up a person and his morality. But I feel I’d have taken much longer because that’s how we used to write back then.”

It’s one of those quirks he feels arises from the excitement of absorbing from reality. He recalls a character from his cult hit Vrithakrithyilulla Chathuram, the 2019 movie that he also shot. It was about a lonely man who lived in South Korea having to visit India upon receiving news of his father’s death. A man in the film is called on only for the body to be removed, which had decayed over weeks of negligence. “That character was based on a Malayali scavenger I met when I lived with a group of friends in Bangalore. At one point, we were told that our neighbour had died and there was a strong stench emanating from next door. As a favour, we all got together to pay this scavenger to remove that body. He would start his work only after he got extremely drunk. I just borrowed that character.” 

He looks back at how he was perceived when he came down to Kerala with the idea of making movies in the early 2010s. His ideas were still as different and strange as they are now and the producers in Kerala were not ready for him. “It’s not that I was saying totally new things or trying to say them in a new way. My ideas were simple enough, but it is the 'how' of what I wanted to say that pushed them away. It’s a creative style that used the deconstruction of a subject, but it was still new then.”

Back then, he wonders how all those people saw him. “For some, I may have been a madman. For others, I was a creative purist who did not live in the real world. There were, of course, the others who asked me what I was smoking,” he laughs.

“But in time, I feel the audience and the industry have begun to identify with that style.” This includes a film that may happen soon, with Mohanlal playing the lead. “It has become easy for me to keep on writing. I hardly get stuck and there’s no writer’s block anymore. There's an audience even for my kind of ideas.”