After completing his graduation Pavithran made two unsuccessful attempts to get admission at the Pune Film Institute.
Later he made a shift in his form of filmmaking with Uppu (Salt, 1986), where he adopted the middle-stream cinema model.
In 1989, he directed Utharam which was written by M. T. Vasudevan Nair and featured Mammootty in the lead role.
The film is about the investigative journey that the protagonist embarks on in order to find the reasons behind a poet's suicide, a bizarre step she took despite her picture-perfect life.
He was married to Kalamandalam Kshemavathy, with whom he had two daughters, Eva, an actress in South Indian films, and Lakshmi.