Director Sriram Raghavan is awaiting the release of his next film, ‘Merry Christmas’, and it features an unlikely pair of Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi. During a recent interaction, the filmmaker mentioned how it’s a bad idea to write films with certain actors in mind. It is so because then you end up writing in cliches.?

When asked about his quirky casting in the upcoming film, Raghavan recalled a story about being approached by Sunny Deol, who called him after he was impressed with a documentary he’d directed in the early ’90s.?

Raghavan told Galatta Plus, “If I keep an actor in mind on the blank page, it’s damn tough. You end up writing cliched stuff that’s already been done. Many years back, I’d not even made a single film. Sunny Deol happened to see (the Raman Raghav documentary), he called me and said, ‘Let’s do something’.”

He continued, “Few months I was just enjoying myself, thinking, ‘I’m doing a film for Sunny Deol’. But I was not writing anything of any value. I realised I ended up doing what I’d seen before. This was Sunny after ‘Damini’ and all, when he was absolutely on top. Now he’s back in the reckoning, which is good.”?

Raghavan also talked about casting Varun Dhawan in ‘Badlapur’ despite having an older actor in mind. Revealing how one-film-old Varun was not his first choice for the film, the director did mention that the actor was very good in it, and ‘it is a wonderful performance’.

Stating how he’s getting too much credit for his out-of-the-box casting, Raghavan said, “For Badlapur, I had someone much older in my mind… I had proper actors in mind, like Irrfan. Then (producer Dinesh Vijan) felt what if it’s someone young. Someone like Varun, who’d just done ‘Student of the Year’. It so happened that he called me up at that time, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s call him and test it out with him’. Then he asked me the same day, ‘Do you really think I can do it?’ In my head, I’m thinking, ‘I have no idea’. I actually had no idea, but you sort of say, ‘Why not?'”

Meanwhile, after the release of ‘Merry Christmas’, the director would move on to ‘Ikkis’, starring Agastya Nanda and Dharmendra.