Arjun Das and Aditi Shankar on ‘Once More’ and choosing stories that speak to them

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Tamil cinema has been reminding its fans that August is Romance Awareness Month. Every Friday of the month has seen on-screen romance in a distinct shade. If it was the bloody, revenge-fuelled tryst in DC , the Independence Day week saw Suriya in an age-gap romance in Vishwanath & Sons . The third week saw many little rom-coms like Pyaar Prema Kalyanam and Modha Rathiri . And now, this coming week, two romance dramas are set to hit the screens: Hi and Once More .

Debutant director Vignesh Srikanth’s Once More promises to celebrate love in its most tender, most lyrical form. The film starring Arjun Das, Aditi Shankar and Sona Olickal has generated a lot of buzz online over the last two years, especially thanks to composer Hesham Abdul Wahab’s stirring songs.

The musical romance drama has had a long journey since its inception, while its lead star Arjun has had a longer journey with director Srikanth; the latter worked as an assistant director in Bejoy Nambiar’s Por , which starred Arjun. “Even before that, he had narrated a line to me. Then, after Por , when we took a two-month break, he narrated the script.” Srikanth made several popular short films before finding his feature film break. “I had watched a lot of those short films, and I understood that he knows what he wants very clearly. Also, everyone in the short film circle had only good things to say about Srikanth. So when I heard the narration, it was a beautiful story with a lot of emotions and drama, and it was a clean musical love story.”

Aditi, on the other hand, had a lot of faith, since Yuvaraj Ganesan of Million Dollar Studios was backing the project. “He has a knack for picking scripts like Good Night and Lover . Then, during the narration, I could relate to many things in the script.” What she didn’t expect, however, was to see Srikanth use a playlist of popular songs as references during the narration. “Every scene will have a reference from the playlist, which consists of songs in Tamil, Hindi and Malayalam. So sometimes, even when we are shooting those scenes, those songs would be playing in the background to bring us into that mood. I really liked that,” she says.

Arjun Das and Aditi Shankar in a still from ‘Once More’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The internet community knows Srikanth as a Mani Ratnam fanatic, and given that his guru Bejoy also hails from Mani Ratnam’s school of cinema, one can expect some inadvertent influences in the film, says Arjun. “I saw two Mani sir fans when I was working in Por . So there will be glimpses of Mani Ratnam in Once More , because many of his references were from that school of cinema.” What AR Rahman’s soundtrack did to several Mani Ratnam films is what composer Hesham’s songs attempt to do in Once More . “Hesham is the soul of the film.