Resul Pookutty on Why ‘Kaabil’ Was Hell, but a Big Blessing Too

Resul Pookutty shares his ‘Kaabil’ experience and why Hrithik Roshan’s latest film was his biggest challenge ever.

Hrithik Roshan with Oscar winning sound designer Resul Pookutty and team in the mixing rooms of Kaabil. (Photo courtesy: Twitter/@resulp)

Hrithik Roshan plays a dubbing artist in his latest film Kaabil. He speaks in many different voices, and each of them sounds so authentic that audiences actually believe that the actor’s voice has been dubbed by the respective original artists.

For Oscar-winning sound designer Resul Pookutty, it was the biggest challenge of his career.

It took us ten months from prep to fruition of the voices, the way you hear in <i>Kaabil</i>.&nbsp;I knew that Hrithik was a dubbing artist and imitating other voices is the main key factor of the film’s narrative, which Gupta explained me earlier on.

Resul Pookutty, Sound Designer

Director Sanjay Gupta put an astonishing level of responsibility on Resul.

He (Sanjay Gupta) said that “I have written these scenes with you in mind”, which put a lot of pressure on me, as every sound man would enjoy a line like that from his trusted director. But it put me in a spin. I was apprehensive, wondering if he was expecting too much from me. So I had to prepare well.

Resul Pookutty

Hrithik wouldn’t let Resul breathe easy until the dubbing scenes were achieved perfectly.

Hrithik Roshan won’t let you ease out, collectively we decide to go with a plan. The plan was first to shoot all those phone-call sequences, where he fools the villains with the voices of the actual actors, and how they would speak their lines as their own characters. Then we gave the videos to Hrithik to rehearse with. He locked himself up in his room and when he came out to shoot those scenes, he was a different person with multiple personalities.

Resul Pookutty

A lot of the scenes where Hrithik impersonates the villains were shot in public.

Sanjay Gupta made it tough for us, keeping those scenes in a public telephone booth with trains running behind. So Hrithik had to really stretch his voice to arrive at a performance, that was a perfect mixture of his character Rohan with those he was imitating. Because it was a sync sound film, it posed a real challenge to digitally process the voices with all those location noises in the track.

Resul Pookutty

Resul  knew he was dealing with a perfectionist in Hrithik.

I realised that the path I have chosen is a tough one. Then I started my research, to make Hrithik sound like the way he heard himself in the first line of Wasim’s scene. It meant a three-way technical process. I started analysing what happens when we hear somebody mimicking somebody else. Hrithik told me that he himself was a good mimic. So was I in my college days. We sound ‘like’ the other person, but not exactly the same, which means that a part of you will remain in all the mimicking process. It would be easy and cheap to just dub the scenes with the other characters and get away with it. But Hrithik’s resolution to remain truthful to mimicking made my life hell. How do I retain Rohan in all the mimicking scenes and make it believable for the audience?

Resul Pookutty

Resul says that together they decided to approach the scenes differently, rather than take a traditional view.

We took those scenes and called Ronit Roy, Rohit Roy, Girish Kulkarni and Rubina, and asked them to dub the scenes not exactly in their voices, but extending the presence of their voices in their characters, for that’s what we do in mimicry. So we made all of them dub the scenes in their exaggerated versions. It was difficult for them, because they kept complaining that this is not how Ronit as Shellar speaks. Hrithik had to really speak to all of them personally and make them understand what we were trying to achieve. They reluctantly resolved into acceptance. There was great trust that all of them showed and I thank all of them.Then I made Hrithik dub those lines again extending his exaggerated version of Rohan imitating these characters. Now I had three elements with me. Firstly, the original performance of Hrithik as the characters, secondly the characters themselves doing an exaggerated version of their voices, and thirdly Hrithik’s exaggerated version of Rohan imitating these characters. Then it was a question of morphing these voices into one another, which had never been done before. The first thing was to match all the voices. I used a dynamic spectrum analysing technique to match them in-sync up to one millionth of a second, then I pitch matched each voice to its original character, by matching&nbsp; the pitch of their original voices taking samples from other scenes.

Resul Pookutty

A  very high precision pitch- matching software was used to achieve this complex sound design.

I had to tweak each version of the voice by increasing or decreasing the male-female element and age element of each voice. How do you do that? The understanding of Yin and Yang helped me a lot in this, because every male voice has a certain female element and vice versa. For example Rohit has more ‘fermant’ (female element) than Ronit’s voice and vice versa. I found Girish Kulkarni was tough to match in this process. My experience in the Tamil&nbsp; film Remo helped me a lot in matching Rubina’s voice. In Remo I changed&nbsp; the hero Shivakarthikeyan’s voice into a female voice in the whole film. Once I matched all these elements, I myself was wondering who is talking like whom? Then I morphed each word, sometimes a whole line, sometimes an expression, into each other to create a smoother dialogue delivery in the film’s scenes, without losing the dramatic content.

Resul Pookutty

Now for Hrithik doing Mr Bachchan’s voice.

Then came Big B. None of us had the guts to ask Mr Bachchan to dub the scene for us like the way we did the character scenes. We had to approach that scene differently. This was made possible only because of Hrithik’s mimicry talent. I had worked very closely with Mr Bachchan’s voice in Black and I knew his timbre like the back of my hand. And Hrithik mimicked him superbly. I did dynamic spectral matching, pitch correction and frequency equalisation to arrive at the perfect baritone for Big B. When I went to the mixing room I had seven versions of his voice. Hrithik and I chose different degrees of Big B’s voice in each line and retained the quality as if Rohan is imitating him, and it’s dangerously close to Mr Bachchan’s original voice.

Resul Pookutty

An exhausted Resul says that an extraordinary level of voice modulation has gone into Kaabil.

Audiences don’t know when they watch the movie that we have done all these manipulations in voicing. For example in the first few scenes, Hrithik is made to sound like a nice and loveable boy. But by the interval, he sounds like a determined and unstoppable man. All this has been achieved with careful digital processing. So when a critic wrote about his character development in the film, I feel happy that I helped my Rohan electronically to reach out to the audience’s heart. That’s where I changed myself from a technician to an artist in Kaabil. Apart from the wonderful technical talents from my Mumbai studio, some of the best designers from Europe also worked on the film to arrive at what you hear in Kaabil. There’s no limit to anything you want to achieve in films these days.

Resul Pookutty