H Vinoth on the Jana Nayagan ordeal: 'The issue was never with the Censor Board'

Jana Nayagan opens tomorrow, and H Vinoth has finally done the thing he avoided for six months: sat down and walked through the whole ordeal, from the certification freeze to the leak that put Vijay’s last film online before a single ticket was sold. The most striking part of his account is who he refuses to blame. “I believe the problem was never with the Censor Board,” he says. “There may have been other reasons behind the delay, but without evidence, I cannot name anyone.”

The timeline he lays out makes that claim sharper. The team started certification roughly 20 days before the planned January 9 release, twice the usual head start. The board watched the film promptly, told them there was no issue with the movie itself, and offered a U/A 16+ certificate if a few violent scenes were trimmed. The team agreed. The trims needed CGI work, which cost an extra day, and when they returned with the updated version they were asked for a few more edits. They agreed to those too. Then the online portal simply stopped accepting their upload.

“We informed them through phone calls and emails and even contacted the head office,” Vinoth says. The answer, when it eventually came, was that the portal had been blocked because a complaint had been filed against the film. Theatres, distributors and fans had already spent heavily on a Pongal release that was now not happening, and the team had nothing to tell them, because they themselves had neither an approval nor a rejection in hand. That non-answer continued until they went to court, at which point they were told the film would be re-examined.

What it re-emerged with was an A certificate, which Vinoth accepted with open reluctance. Getting any certificate had become the whole battle, he says, and when the board indicated A was the only option, the team spoke to the producer and took it. “It disappoints us too. But we truly did not have the time to fight it. Releasing this film was our first priority.” The sting is specific for a Vijay film: children have always been part of his audience, and this time they cannot come. Vinoth says everyone on the team felt that, Vijay included.

He is equally direct about what the six months did not change. The film was shot before the election, the censor process did not permit alterations to its content, and the political dialogues, which he calls the most important thing in it, are intact. “Jana Nayagan is not just a commercial film, and it is not a party tribute. We have spoken about sensitive politics, and I want that content to be watched and discussed.” He also swatted down the claim that the film staged the gesture Vijay later made in the Assembly. It was the other way around, he says: what Vijay did in the Assembly came from the film.

On the leak, Vinoth calls the episode a heartbreak the team took a long time to absorb, and he dismisses the theory that the makers released it themselves to boost Vijay’s campaign. That idea, he argues, undervalues the man it was supposed to help. “He would have succeeded regardless, whether the film leaked or had never even been made.” The investigation, as he describes it, was thorough: the leaked footage carried editing reference marks, so police knew it came from the edit stage, questioned the entire editing team, and even worked with Google to rule out a Drive transfer. No digital leak existed. Instead, investigators concluded that a freelance editor copied the footage to a hard disk when the room emptied, assembled the reels, synced the sound, and watched the finished film with around 15 people. From there it spread through friends and acquaintances until, by the police’s own account to the court, some 1.2 crore people had seen it. The alleged source remains in custody, bail refused, and the state has since invoked the Goondas Act on others in the chain. What nobody has established, Vinoth admits, is whether anyone stood behind him. Under aggressive interrogation the man revealed nothing, and when Vinoth met him, he simply fell at his feet and wept.

Vijay’s public silence through all of it was deliberate, Vinoth says. A tweet from a sitting Chief Minister about his own film’s piracy would have become the story, so the matter was handled purely as a legal case. Privately, the call went the other direction. “When the film leaked, Vijay sir called me and said, don’t worry, these things happen.”

Vinoth knows plenty of people watched that leaked copy. What moves him is that they are booking tickets anyway. People had every chance to skip the theatre, he says, and they are coming regardless, out of respect for Vijay, and that deserves a salute. Jana Nayagan, with Pooja Hegde, Bobby Deol, Prakash Raj, Gautham Vasudev Menon, Priyamani, Mamitha Baiju and Narain alongside Vijay, and Anirudh’s score behind it, is in theatres July 23.