Barge into your favourite author’s creative space with a phone and then walk out with the content for a documentary a few hours later. Writer Murali Krishnan S has kept it that simple in The Writer’s Room, a breezy work that zooms into the life of GR Indugopan, a celebrated author and screenplay writer in Malayalam.
Humour runs through the 34-minute documentary that begins with Murali, who remains behind the camera throughout, entering Indugopan’s room at his home at Peroorkkada in Thiruvananthapuram.
“I have misused the privilege of having known him for many years to make something different,” says Murali, adding, “I wanted to break the conventional format of a documentary or interview to keep the audience hooked.” That is needed at a time when our attention span is shrinking, says Murali. “This work also takes a dig at our age-old habit of peeping into other people’s lives. I have done exactly that by intruding into the personal space of an individual who keeps to himself, with a camera, which is more dangerous than a gun these days!”
GR Indugopan in the documentary The Writer’s Room
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The intention, Murali says, was also to give aspiring filmmakers and writers a glimpse into his mindspace and creative process. Indugopan, a journalist-turned-writer and recipient of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award (2024) for his book, Aano, has written over 15 novels, several novellas, short story collections and travelogue.
His works have also been adapted into films in Malayalam — Wolf, Oru Thekkan Thallu Case, Kappa, Ponman and the upcoming Prithviraj-movie Vilayath Buddha. He has written the screenplay of some of these movies and has also directed a movie, Ottakkayyan.
Murali sets the mood for the documentary when the camera, read an iPhone, captures the mess in the writer’s room — piled-up books, handwritten notes hung on clothes lines with clips, a printer covered in dust… And his entry irritates Indugopan. “That was my brief to him — to behave a little indifferent at the beginning,” Murali says. “It was not acting because he can’t do that. He is someone who refuses to be in the limelight. Except for planning the chronology of the scenes, everything happened organically, as a give-and-take process. The best part is he was brutally honest.”
Murali Krishnan S
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The blunt questions, some of them silly, and Indugopan’s tit-for-tat replies have created some laugh-out-loud moments. Amidst this, Murali also extracts information about the author’s approach to writing, which is refreshingly pragmatic and candid, at the same time impactful.
For example, he says: “I prefer writing books rather than for movies, but it is (writing for) cinema that gives me the money to stay as a writer. All said and done, writing is a kind of torture. But if you ask why I keep doing this, the answer is I don’t know anything else.” It is interesting to listen to how he arrived at certain stories [for example, the book Chennaya, which became the movie, Wolf] and his observations on several aspects, including the sarong (lungi) he bought from Sri Lanka.
The section on his habit of going on unplanned train trips as a creative exercise is insightful. Such trips have given him stories. He even finishes articles during these journeys, especially when he has to meet a deadline. “I have seen him writing a piece sitting on the upper berth in a compartment,” Murali says. Indugopan quips, “It is a wrong notion that you need solitude to write. I can shut down amidst the noise.”
The documentary also brings out another side of him as he talks about his home, garden, love for chess, cricket etc. “A game (of chess) takes its course, so too my stories. I don’t like making a structure; characters dictate the story. Also, I don’t think I am doing something extraordinary. It is a normal job and writing does not become sacred just because you add imagination to it.” He continues, “Art is unpredictable and it is the imperfections that make art. And no art is above criticism.”
GR Indugopan in the documentary The Writer’s Room
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A poignant moment is when he talks about the cashew trees in his backyard (“Creating a shade is most important, it will help someone”), which he connects with his childhood spent at his home in Kollam. “Raw materials for writing come from my childhood,” he says. The author also talks with much interest about the stories from the region, especially the research that went into the book Naalanchu Cheruppakkar, which was adapted as the movie, Ponman.
Murali stresses that Indugopan has been like a mentor to him. “He wrote the foreword of my first book, Soviet Station Kadavu. Once in a while I catch up with him at his home for 10-15 minutes to recharge myself,” says Murali, an engineer who quit his job in Dubai to pursue his passion for cinema.
A photographer, he is also one of the four scriptwriters of Sthanarthi Sreekuttan, a film that kicked off a revolution in schools early this year. He has made a handful of short films, one of them being Stockholm, which was among the 10 films selected for Netflix’s Take Ten competition for up-and-coming filmmakers. Humour has been his comfort zone and the youngster is still waiting for the big break in the industry.
Murali Krishnan S with GR Indugopan, actor Anand Manmadhan and members of his crew, Anoop V Shylaja, Saran GD and Rishipriyan
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The Writer’s Room was shot over three hours. The DOP is Anoop V Shylaja, editing is by Kailash S Bhavan with Pavi Sankar scoring the music. Anand Manmadhan, who plays a key role in Ponman, makes a cameo appearance.
What did Indugopan say about the documentary? “That it was not bad as he thought it would be”.
The Writer’s Room is streaming on Cue Studio’s YouTube channel.
Published – November 12, 2025 12:11 pm IST
