Deepak Chopra goes Beyond Avatar

British director Suri Krishnamma brings his vividly imaginative style to filming self-help author Deepak Chopra’s Liquid Comics graphics novel Beyond. The film will take viewers to a supernatural world, where a reluctant hero battles his demons and embarks on an epic adventure to find his wife who vanishes from an Indian bazaar.

Liquid Comics announced on Wednesday that it would co-produce Beyond with John Garland and Michael Dufficy.
“Just like Avatar explores outer space, this explores inner space,” Chopra said at the Cinequest Film Festival in Silicon Valley, where he received the festival’s Life of a Maverick Award. How does it feel to be branded as a maverick? “I like to speak with a rebel’s voice, so it feels good,” Chopra replied.

Chopra, who is heralded in America as the “poet-prophet of alternative medicine”, has written the screenplay for Beyond and described his new project as an “adventure into other dimensions”.

“Beyond is a story about reality being multi-dimensional and how we can take journeys to realms we never dreamed of by separating the veils that partition our minds,” he said.

Beyond is a breathless supernatural thriller about businessman Michael Morton, who arrives in India with wife Anna and son Ty on a holiday. When Michael is drawn into a telephone call with a colleague, Anna and Ty wander through a bazaar.

Ty watches as his mother enters a shop, never to come out.
Michael launches a desperate search for his wife, and things turn hairy: Michael hears his wife’s whispering sobs for help although he can’t see her.

This sets the premise for the action film with a new generation of special effects.

“Deepak and I have the opportunity of making a great action-adventure movie,” said Krishnamma, who has directed films like Wuthering Heights, A Man of No Importance and New Year’s Day.

“It is a fantastic journey of a man in search of his missing wife — realising that he is in fact on a journey of self-discovery that transcends our own dimension and takes us into parallel worlds. Beyond is about an ordinary man who is thrust into these multiple dimensions and asked to take on the responsibility of a mythic hero,” he added.