Suriya, Rajamouli cheer on Fahadh Faasil's Don't Trouble the Trouble

Suriya was the chief guest in Chennai as Don’t Trouble the Trouble, the Fahadh Faasil fantasy presented by SS Rajamouli, geared up for its October 2 release. Rajamouli, producer SS Karthikeya, child actor Ssara Palekar, editor Praveen Antony and producer Ishari K Ganesh joined Fahadh on stage for an evening that was as much about friendship as it was about the film.

Directed by debutant Shashank Yeleti, the film stars Fahadh as Suri, a daredevil for whom every task is a cakewalk, as the first single Cake-u Walk-u put it. Ssara plays Divya, the girl who chases him around the film.

Fahadh said the project began with a text from Karthikeya offering him two stories and letting him pick either. He liked both and said he would do both. Then Karthikeya told him Rajamouli would present the film. “I told him he could get a better actor than me,” Fahadh said. “I don’t think I have ever had a good opening in Telugu. I hope this film changes that.”

He had never heard a story like it or played a character like Suri, he said, which is why he agreed immediately. The team shot for 100 to 120 days, and when he watched the finished film recently he was surprised by it. He also noted that Karthikeya was producing Rajamouli’s Varanasi on the next floor in Hyderabad while this film was shooting, and still spent his time with their crew.

Most of his praise went to Ssara. “She is the child who always surprised me. In the middle of a scene she would tell me how I could say my line,” he said. “I don’t think any co-star has worked with me with that much dedication. This film will make you laugh and make you cry.”

Ssara kept her speech short and sweet. “Abra ka shabra. Vanakkam Chennai,” she began, thanking Suriya, and invited everyone into the film’s magical world on Gandhi Jayanti.

Rajamouli explained how the film came to him. An architect once told him that the best building is one whose outline you can draw on a fingernail, and he believes the same of cinema: a two-and-a-half-hour film should fit into two or three lines. When Shashank asked for three hours to narrate the story, Rajamouli asked whether he could do it in five minutes instead. Shashank offered one sentence: the story of a man who kidnaps a ghost. “The moment he said it, I loved it,” Rajamouli said.

He called Fahadh the rascal of the film and said he cried and laughed while watching the first copy, before dubbing or music had been added. Divya, he said, is a match for Suri in every scene, and he suspected the two actors were rivals on set trying to outdo each other. He thanked Kamal Haasan for voicing the Tamil trailer, Balakrishna for the Telugu one and Mohanlal for the Malayalam. He also congratulated Suriya on the double success of Karuppu and Vishwanath & Sons, and wished him well for Seen in November, in which Suriya returns as a police officer.

Suriya spoke the longest, and the warmest. He said he had always believed Tamils were the best at hospitality until he saw how people in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana welcome guests. At 50, he said, cinema still surprises him, and this combination of Fahadh, Rajamouli and Karthikeya is one nobody saw coming. “Can someone kidnap a ghost? And if they do, what happens? That’s why I’m waiting to watch this film.”

Fahadh calls him anna, and Suriya said the two have talked at every hour of the day and night, including about how neither of them got where they are easily. He admired Fahadh for skipping the calculations most actors make about their image. “We all do maths like a maths teacher, working out who will like a film and who won’t. I still get those sums wrong. Fahadh only looks at whether the story and his character are good.” He pointed out that Fahadh dubbed his own part in every language.

Suriya also made a case for children’s films, saying Indian cinema has left that audience to Netflix, Amazon and Disney, and called this a children’s film for grown-ups. He congratulated Rajamouli on 25 years as a director and, to laughter, asked for a special appearance in one of his films, even for a day or a minute. He closed by thanking Rajamouli for taking Indian cinema to the world under his own name.

Karthikeya thanked Suriya for coming and said this is the first film produced by his company. He called it an honest, sweet film that carries the emotion of a Rajamouli picture rather than the budget, with a second half he expects to win audiences over. He is, he said, a huge Fahadh fan, and Ssara has worked real magic in it.

Praveen Antony first met the team while cutting the RRR trailer, and said Karthikeya never takes anything lightly: they made so many versions of this film’s trailer that he lost count. A film that brings 60 per cent of its script to the screen is usually counted a success, he said; this one gives 200 per cent. He added that the Tamil version was made with care for small details, not treated as a routine dub, and that it is a film for the whole family this quarterly exam holiday.

Ishari K Ganesh said Fahadh invited him two days earlier and had shown him the trailer, which he liked a lot. He has just completed a film with Fahadh himself, but said he would keep that for another day. The film’s Tamil Nadu distributor, Sakthivelan, told Karthikeya it deserved a 3D release and suggested one for a re-release.

Don’t Trouble the Trouble, with music by Kaala Bhairava and Saurabh Sachdeva also in the cast, releases in theatres on October 2.