In the 1980s, there was a shift in Gopalakrishnan's work as he sought to locate otherness in an interior space that he associated with the creative process. It was an extension of his lifelong fascination with human interiority, which was now given a new context: creativity. Mathilukal (The Walls, 1989) and Anantaram (Monologue, 1987) feature men who, like many of his protagonists, are physically or psychically displaced but invent and inhabit a complex imaginary world, thus reconfiguring their sense of difference. Such is their immersion in this world that it acquires a perfectly convincing reality that is more compelling than the one that lies outside it, thus leaving the question open as to what constitutes the real. We have already seen how in Mukhamukham an entire community collectively authored an image that, at the end of the film, turned out to be more real than the man on which it was based. In these films, as well, the imaginary comes to take the place of the real and exceeds it in terms of veracity. In each case the power of the human mind and its creative potential is affirmed.

In Mathilukal, Basheer is a political activist and author who finds himself in jail, cut off from the contexts in which he functions as a writer. The film focuses on how he engages with the creative process from within while virtually isolated from the rest of the world. Anantaram also describes an inner process. Its subject is a young man with a serious psychological condition who invents alternate realities that are at the heart of his complex narratives. To these films of the '80s, one must add Gopalakrishnan's Nizhalkkuthu, made in 2002, which features an older man—an outsider in his community—whose power of empathy enables him to reinvent the story he listens to in the second half of the film. If, so far, we've encountered men who were actively engaged in the creative process, in this later film, the protagonist serves as the receiver or recipient of an oral narrative that triggers a radical rewriting of the story.