It’s not often that you come across a veteran filmmaker in the Tamil film industry willing to be directed by a 19-year-old. So, when that happens, the entire industry is naturally interested in the project. Naiyappudai, which features veteran director S A Chandrasekhar in the lead along with Pa Vijay and Chandini, has been directed by a newcomer named Vijay Kiran.
Says, the 72-year-old Chandrasekar, who has completed 40 years in the Tamil industry, “My wife and son Vijay have been asking me to take rest for the last five years. However, I believe in being active and so I did a film while on a picnic with my assistants in Shimla. It was called Touring Talkies. Producer Kalaipuli S Dhanu who saw me act in that film was impressed by it and insisted I should continue to act. So, one day, he called me and said he was producing this film by an enterprising young director called Vijay Kiran who wanted me to act in his film. When I met Kiran, he didn’t narrate his script but showed it to me on his laptop,” says Chandrasekhar.
He asked Kiran why the youngster wanted to make a film on a 75-year-old man when he could make a romantic film with a younger hero. After all, Kiran was in that age group. He replied, ‘Why must a hero always be 25? Why can’t it be someone older?’ By ‘hero’, he meant the lead character,” he explains.
Kiran told him that in Hollywood, Arnold Schwarzenegger (68) and Sylvester Stallone (69) continue to play lead roles and in Bollywood too, Amitabh Bachchan does the same. “‘So, why not here?’ he asked me. That’s when I knew he had potential and passion,” he adds.
Chandrasekhar has directed over 70 films and also has the honour of having introduced several big heroes to the Tamil film industry including actors Vijay and Vijaykanth. “I agreed to do the film on one condition. I told him I would do it if his father, M Jeevan, a good cinematographer, agreed to be the cameraman. He agreed and that’s how it all began,” says the director.
The team enhanced the script — it was initially only about a 75-year-old man’s thought processes, his thirst for justice, anger and social consciousness. “Pa Vijay had joined us by then and all of us evolved the script which has now become Naiyappudai,” says Chandrasekhar. “It’s about a small incident which turns a peace-loving, childlike 75-year-old ex-defence man into a ferocious person.”
The film revolves around six characters. “Apart from me, Pa Vijay, who plays a TV anchor, Jackson, a seven-year-old boy who plays the role of a child befriending my character, Viji Chandrashekar as the boy’s mother, Naan Kadavul Rajendran as the villain, and MS Baskar as a practical cop, play important roles in this film,” he elaborates.
Chandrasekhar is all praise for music director Taj Noor, who, he says, scored wonderful numbers for the film. “The way director Vijay worked with the music director was fantastic,” he says.
The director says he is from an old school of thought and “have always stuck to a form of grammar when it comes to filmmaking, but today, youngsters don’t hesitate to change the rules. For instance, director Vijay Kiran shot seven scenes, all of which had dialogues. Later, when he went to work with the music director, he removed all the dialogues and replaced them with music. We asked him why he knocked off the dialogues and he replied that the visuals were self-explanatory and therefore dialogues were redundant,” he says.