Ask Arunraja about this and he says, "The film isn't preachy. In a shot in the trailer, we see a picture of Periyar in the background as Aishwarya Rajesh is stepping out of her house. "He then started his production company and everything took off." "Siva called me and asked if I'd sold the script to the ICC," Arunraja laughs.
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The script for Kanaa was ready in about four months and Arunraja was wondering how to move ahead when India won against Australia in the semfinals of the ICC women's cricket World Cup.
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From his yearning to graduate from the tennis ball to the leather ball, to the time when his father beat him up because he was hooked to a cricket game on TV without studying for his exams. When he wrote the script, Arunraja also wove in his own aspirations from his cricketing days to make it as authentic as possible. But what I observed was that it's in homes where the daughters are close to the fathers that they are able to live their dreams," he says. The mother-daughter relationship has been shown often and usually, it's the moms who support their daughters. That's when I decided I'd make a film on a father-daughter duo. I could see how invested they were in their daughter's dream. "It was the fathers who encouraged them, gave them glucose in between. Interestingly, the players all had their fathers cheering for them from the stands.
There were many angles to this story," he shares. A few said they wanted to become cricketers themselves but couldn't, so they wanted their daughter to become one. Or they'd say that she always used to play with the boys. "I'd ask them how they knew their daughter liked to play cricket, and they'd say that they had no was the neighbours or teachers who told them. Aarti invited Arunraja to watch a few games and that's how the director ended up chatting with the parents of the girls. Through Lakshmi Priyaa, Arunraja met Aarti Sankaran, who is a coach with the Tamil Nadu women's cricket team. But my story is not set in those times, it starts from 2002-2003 to contemporary times," he adds. They had to pay for themselves, from travel to their kit bag. The Women's Cricket Association did not have much funding. In her days, women's cricket was not under the BCCI. "I switched on the camera and she spoke for nearly four hours. Therefore, Arunraja questioned Lakshmi Priya about the women players she'd met from rural parts of the state, and her observations on their body language and strengths. Her struggle will be bigger but the victory will be sweeter," he says. She will have to live with a lot of restrictions in an orthodox society. But what about someone from a rural area? A girl who has reached puberty won't be allowed to go anywhere. There's greater exposure here, it's enough if her parents allow her to play the game. I thought a story about a Chennai girl going to play cricket wouldn't be that exceptional. I told her about it and asked her if she could share some experiences from her life – how and why she started playing cricket, interesting incidents that happened to other girls who played with her and so on. "I knew that she was a cricket player, so she was the first person I met. He didn't have to go too far for a start – actor Lakshmi Priyaa Chandramouli (of Lakshmi fame) used to play in the B team at the national level. To write his story, Arunraja met young women who were playing cricket. So, I decided to make a film on a woman bowler," he explains. And also, all the stories have been about batsmen, not about bowlers. That's when I realised nobody has made a film on women's cricket. However, Arunraja felt enough cricket films had already been made. A part of my life is owned by cricket," he says. I became close to my friends by playing cricket, including Siva. It was college by the time I got to do that, after I finished my second year. I always wanted to play leather ball cricket. Cricket is something I've loved from childhood. "But we played for four days and it was on the fourth day that we lost the final. In fact, Arunraja and his team had brought with them only one set of clothes for changing, convinced as they were that they'd return home the very next day! When we came to Chennai to play, we never thought we'd reach the final." We won the zonals and in the inter-zonals, which had teams from all over Tamil Nadu, we were the runners-up. "Not too big a cricketer but I have represented my college team. How did Arunraja decide on such an unusual subject for his first film? Though a few women actors in the Tamil film industry are doing films as solo leads, it's still far from being the norm.