RJ-turned-actor Balaji Venugopal recently became a director with the Yogi Babu-starrer Lucky Man, which hit theatres last week along with quite a few other releases. Despite the competition, the film managed to win the hearts of the audience with its simple, relatable and comical screenplay. The director reveals that a real-life incident inspired him to make Lucky Man. “Once, when I went to drop off a friend, I noticed that there was no parking arrangement in the area. There are posh apartments with absolutely no space for parking. So I was inspired to make a film about such a parking problem,” he recalls adding that he didn’t want the film to be only about the issue.
“I added a head and tail to it, by including the whole luck factor into the story. Slowly the film developed into a fulllength feature film.” Interestingly, Yogi Babu, who is oscillating between playing the lead and a comedian, and has a release every other week, was seen headlining not just Lucky Man but also Thangar Bachan’s Karumegangal Kalaigindrana. While some might feel he is being overused, Balaji had no doubt who he wanted to headline his debut directorial.
“The film is about a commoner, and I wanted someone to sell the story perfectly to other commoners. Who else but Yogi Babu?” Rajathanthiram- fame Veera plays the nemesis of Yogi Babu’s Murugan in the film, and Balaji reveals that the character was specifically written for the actor, who recently made a comeback to the big screen with Ajith Kumar’s Thunivu. “Veera and I have been friends for a long time. We have mostly seen him in serious and even psychopathic roles. I wanted to give him a holistically written dignified character. At the same time, he worked perfectly for this character because of the stark contrast between Yogi Babu’s Murugan and Veera’s Shiva Kumar.”
One of the highlights of Lucky Man was definitely the dialogues. Considering Balaji and Yogi Babu’s penchant for comedy, the film does score on the comic front, but Lucky Man also manages to surprise the audience with powerful message- packed punch lines. “While I had a co-writer to help me with the filtering process of the script, I penned the screenplay and dialogues for the film. I had the final say in how the characters behave because all of them are different versions of me,” he explains. As much as the dialogues were lauded, the film also had issues of lip-syncing because Yogi Babu seems to have ad-libbed a lot during the dubbing stages.
“The dubbing nonsync is a creative liberty we take with the hopes that the audience would forgive us while enjoying the content we give them. Both Yogi Babu and I thought of some quirky comebacks while dubbing, and added them in post-production. Hence the non-sync. We put in a lot of effort to give the audience the best content, so we request them to neglect the small mistakes we make in the process.” While the film does revolve around luck, Balaji has a more pragmatic outlook. “We put in a lot of hard work today to see it pay off tomorrow.
We tend to call the fruits of our hard work as luck. But in reality, there is no luck without due effort, and that’s the message of Lucky Man.” In some ways, it is this pragmatism that made Balaji realise his calling as a director. “It was only during the pandemic that I realised direction is also my forte. After helming the web series Paani Poori, I got the confidence to make a full-length feature film. I learnt screenwriting and filmmaking and took a lot of effort to reach this place. Therefore, my hard work has made me a Lucky Man,” signs off a confident Balaji.