Late Tamil filmmaker Balaji enjoyed the tag of ‘king of remakes’. His mantra was simple: let the heat of the original subside for six months, give it a desi coating with stars and rake in moolah.
Much like the late Balaji, ‘Remake Raja’ was a tag which sat well on the shoulders of director Mohan Raja till he realised that the creative side of his could do with some originality. There was the burning desire to prove wrong his sceptics, who took delight in rubbing it on him.
Thani Oruvan has changed the equation for the soft-spoken director, who for the first time had the initial of M before his name. Call it luck or superstition, that has done wonders for Raja, having had the orchestrated support of his father, Editor Mohan right from the first film, Jeyam.
Raja says remakes are not as simple as it sounds, in the fashion of running behind the pace-setter in a long distance race. “You have to pad it up well to give it the regional flavour. There is that huge advantage of the confidence factor before taking the plunge, but once in there, it boils down to extracting the best out of the material in front of you.”
Disagreeing to agree that creative fulfilment is not possible in remakes, Raja says it is common in Hollywood to have directors hiring writers and the double-standard ways of Kollywood in viewing the directors penning their own scripts a notch superior, baffles him no end.
Rewinding the days, the director says the seven remakes so far were not intentional and it was a family decision. “My father’s advice is to be faithful to the original, fine-tune it for the local flavour and present it with distinct style.”
A product of the Film and Television Institute of India, Raja says the feeling could not be spelled out with the first original script he has penned after a decade of getting approbation of all, right from the average movie-goer to the discerning audience.
That explains the reasons for breaking down in the media interaction post the success. Raja says he lived with the script of Thani Oruvan for over three years, and its execution was simpler than living with it in his mind.
What really pumped him to walk the extra mile in Thani Oruvan? The director says the pain lingered in him for long when the remake of Ramana he was to do fell through when the makers did not agree to his idea to present it in a realistic way.
Having smelled the long-awaited success of an original hit, Raja says he had a point to prove and the ideal balance would be to rotate the remakes and originals.
What was so special about Thani Oruvan? For Raja, the winner was the script, where he envisaged why the protagonist has to wait till long to get even with the bad man. “Looking from the common man’s view and who puts a price on his ticket, the director in me did not surface. The effort was a reflection of the social outlook and the system or the lack of it which disturbed me.”
Director Raja is on a good run again—as good as he was at making remakes.