Through The Writer’s Room, An Unfiltered Portrait Of GR Indugopan
In Ted Hughes’ The Thought-Fox, a creature slips quietly into the poet’s dim room,soft-footed, unpredictable suddenly filling the blank space with life. In Murali Krishnan S’s The Writer’s Room, the fox doesn’t creep in; it barges through the door with an iPhone, points the lens at a notoriously private writer, and says, “Okay, start living.”
And somehow, that intrusion becomes cinema.
Murali’s 34-minute Malayalam documentary is an unconventional, mischievous, almost impolite peek into the world of GR Indugopan — a journalist-turned-writer, recipient of the 2024 Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Aano, and author of over fifteen novels, several novellas, short-story collections, and a travelogue. His works have travelled widely too, adapted into Malayalam films such as Wolf, Oru Thekkan Thallu Case, Kappa, Ponman, and the upcoming Prithviraj-starrer Vilayath Buddha.
It is the kind of film that shouldn’t have worked on paper—a director walking into a writer’s personal cocoon in Peroorkkada, Thiruvananthapuram, shooting whatever unfolds, with no formal interview, no neat structure, no reverent lighting. But that is precisely why it works. The Writer’s Room feels like a cross between a home invasion and a creative excavation.
The film opens, quite literally, with a mess books stacked like geological layers, handwritten notes clipped on clotheslines, a printer wearing a shawl of dust. Into this chaos walks Murali, and the first thing we see is Indugopan’s irritation.
Speaking to Timeline, Murali laughs as he recalls this:
“That was my brief to him — behave a little indifferent in the beginning. He can’t act anyway. He doesn’t like limelight, so the irritation was real.”
Murali never intended to make a documentary in the traditional sense.
“The main intention was not even to make a film,” he says.
“I just wanted to record Indugopan as the person behind the letters. We share a good companionship. He wrote the preface to my first book. But he always avoids the camera. So I wanted others, especially young writers and filmmakers, to see the world only I have had access to.”
This intention becomes the film’s beating heart.
There is no sanctified literary halo here. No philosophical jargon. No dramatised shots of the writer gazing out of a window. Instead, we get something braver—the raw, unfiltered, brutally honest person behind the celebrated name.
One of the joys of the film is how Murali’s silly, blunt questions provoke equally blunt replies. Indugopan fires back with the same energy, creating laugh-out-loud moments that peel away the “literary icon” façade.
Between the jokes, though, the film lands its emotional punches.
Like when Indugopan admits:
“Writing is torture. But I don’t know anything else. Cinema pays me, but books make me who I am.”
Or when he casually demolishes the romantic myth of creativity:
“It’s a wrong notion that you need solitude to write. I can shut down even in noise.”
This is the kind of refreshing candour the literary world rarely permits.
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The film opens with a quote from William Burroughs,
“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being…”
When asked about his intention behind this, Murali said,
“Indugopan’s characters are often brutal or tough. That is not how he is in real life. The quote hints at that other side — the part of him that writes these characters. The parasitic being is the creative shadow.”
It is a fascinating lens. The documentary never states it outright, but it quietly asks,
Who is the person writing these stories, and who do those stories turn him into?
Murali describes the film as a POV experiment balanced on a thin wire between authenticity and constructed narrative.
“If this was a formal conversation, it wouldn’t work,” he says.
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“I had references — like that French Picasso documentary and a horror film shot from a ghost’s POV. This too is fiction in a way, but it doesn’t become plastic. I had clear ideas on chronology, but everything else happened organically.”
The result is a documentary that feels like eavesdropping on friendship.
In the documentary, Indugopan remarks that people assume imagination is divine. It isn’t. It’s work.
Murali shares the same:
“Yes, he said it brutally honestly. Writing isn’t divine. It’s a job. Easy reading is hard writing. He writes so simply, but that simplicity is the hardest thing.”
This grounding perspective is possibly The Writer’s Room’s greatest achievement.
It de-mythologises the writer without diminishing him.
Murali believes the film also unintentionally comments on the state of writers in contemporary Kerala.
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“There is no culture of writers’ rooms here. Writers are underpaid. Indugopan writes because he loves to, not for money. His room is his cocoon — small, functional, messy, full of stories.”
So Murali breaks into that cocoon not to violate it, but to show what a writer looks like when stripped of the ceremonial aura we tend to impose on artists.
Between anecdotes about unplanned train journeys, childhood memories, cashew trees that create shade, and the chessboard that mirrors his storytelling philosophy, Indugopan reveals himself not as an “extraordinary creator,” but as a man who sees writing as a normal job with abnormal demands.
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The Writer’s Room ends with a punchline worthy of his dry wit.
When asked what he thought of the documentary, he replies,
“Not as bad as I expected.”
That alone feels like a full review, coming from him.
Murali’s The Writer’s Room isn’t your typical documentary.
It’s truly an act of literary trespassing — a filmmaker walking into a writer’s den, following the scent like Hughes’ fox, leaving footprints on the blank page of a documentary that becomes unexpectedly alive.
It’s raw.It’s funny.It is, in every sense, a room worth entering. And like any good fox, Murali leaves quietly after stirring the woods.
