Jayam Raja (or Mohan Raja, as he’s going to remind the world when Thani Oruvan’s credits roll) has a streak of righteous anger within, when he begins talking about why he made this film. The first original script that he’s done after a decade in filmdom, the trailer has raised a lot of expectations ahead of it’s Independence weekend release. Excerpts from a fuelled conversation:
Cut Off
I’ve been living life one film at a time. That’s why all my films have been hits. I’ve had a pretty hard time these last four years. Its been three and a half years and I’ve not been talking to people. I’ve not been myself. Especially after the Hindi version of Ramana was stalled after I took the advance. I wanted to make the movie in a way that made sense to me. But they didn’t agree and that’s why I dropped out of that project.
Script Attack
That’s when I decided that I would work on a script all on my own. I just wanted to prove that I wasn’t born only to make remakes. How long can I keep going backwards, I have to go forward. Each time, I made those remakes because it kept coming my way and I would have been a fool to turn it down. Right now, I feel good that I’ve made a film entirely on my own.
Message Time
In Velayutham I had the satisfaction of having delivered a good message in a commercial format. This will be another dimension. In my film the hero decides on his own to destroy a man whom he picks as his enemy. I may do a whole lot of remakes after this but this is special to me. This story came to me when I was thinking about who my enemy was. There was a lot of anger flowing through me and I didn’t know how to express it. In a lot of ways, Thani Oruvan is an expression of my social outlook and the things that I find wrong with the system. Just like my dad taught me - to give messages that are sugar coated so that people can accept it.