Kamal Haasan in a poster of Indian 2 (courtesy taran_adarsh)

Chennai:

Eight-time National award-winning editor Sreekar Prasad was busy with the work on the Hindi war action biopic starring Sidharth Malhotra when the COVID-19 pandemic threw schedules haywire.

The deadly disease disrupted the schedule of some of his big budget projects on hand—Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan, Shankar’s Kamal Haasan-starrer Indian 2 (both Tamil), and Rajamouli’s RRR (multi-lingual), an NTR-Ram Charan starrer.

The lockdown has been a revelation and the only way was to adapt to the new situation, he told PTI. “….have been working for the past 37 years and always running from pillar to post, every day work, stuff like that and suddenly to land up in a situation where there is no work…”

“I mean it is difficult to communicate with other people, go out because of these lockdowns… really takes a toll on you, I think, initially, to come to terms with reality. But I think as it went on, then you realise that there is nothing much you can do about it and so you go about it in a way that will be productive… so the only option left to me that time was to work from home..,” he said.

Prasad kept himself busy reading new scripts of projects likely to go on floors once the lockdown is lifted, done a few short films, some on home videos and some for the Over-the-top (OTT) platform, one directed by Suhasini Maniratnam for Amazon.

Editing work on Shershah directed by Vishnu Vardhan and Kunal Deshmukh’s Shiddat is almost completed, he said. Prasad used the time during the lockdown to polish the edit and “get into a situation where with those two to three days of shoot they will do soon, editing work will be completed.”

He was constantly in touch with the directors online during the shutdown. On Ponniyin Selvan, he said Vikram, Karthi and Jayam Ravi will be playing the lead roles.

The Nawazuddin Siddiqui-Radhika Apte starrer Raat Akeli Hai directed by Honey Trehan was scheduled for theatre release but because of COVID-19 it was released on the OTT platform.

It was the first movie he edited to be released on this platform and it did well too, being a murder-mystery, Prasad said.

Another ongoing project is Aadujeevitham (Malayalam) directed by Blessy and starring Prithviraj Sukumaran. During the lockdown, he also launched a ”learning every day” channel on YouTube to teach students about editing and filmmaking.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)