Kavin's payday pitch as the Hi team takes its thank-you lap

Kavin has a very specific ask for the second weekend of Hi. “A new month has started. Once you have finished the household expenses, whatever time and money you set aside for entertainment this weekend, spend it on Hi, and I can promise you will go home with a full heart.” The film opened on August 28, the tail end of a month, and Kavin admitted to a small knot of nerves about how much an audience would have left for it after a run of well-received releases. A week on, he has been dropping into theatres in several towns and watching people laugh, and in a few scenes cry, which he says is the whole point of the film. The cast and crew gathered in Chennai this week to say thank you for the response.

The story Kavin wanted to tell was his director’s. Vishnu Edavan’s wedding arrangements were under way in the same weeks the shoot began, so the film’s journey and the man’s ran side by side; a shoot that started at speed then stretched into a long one for a stack of reasons. “People say a life changes only when a film succeeds. This one changed alongside the film.” Kavin’s own creed, he said, is that the road matters more than the destination, because a hit or a flop is one stage, and the people who stand by you on the way are what you keep. He also took a small bow for the casting. When Vishnu narrated the story, Kavin told him the actors he had in mind had to be the actors he got. “Radikaa madam, Prabhu sir, Suhasini madam, Bhagyaraj sir. I could not picture anyone else in those parts.”

Vishnu, standing on a stage as a director for the first time, mostly said thank you: to the people who gave him an identity early in his film career, to a cast that trusted a debutant from the veterans down to Sathyan, Qureshi, Akshay Kumar, Amrutha and Kavya, and to producers Vignesh Shivan, Nayanthara and S.S. Lalit Kumar. The line he lingered on was about his composer. He and Jen Martin have been friends since school, when they told each other one would direct and the other would score, and his first film carries Jen’s music. Jen told the same story from his side, with Kavin in it too: this is his fourth film with both director and actor, and the “you will be an actor, I will be a composer” pact goes back to their school days. Cinematographer Rajesh Shukla, who says he knew Vishnu would make something special from the first narration, calls him Thalapathy.

Lalit Kumar was asked, while making it, why he would produce a film like this after his bigger ones. The answer was the story: Vishnu narrates in a way that lets you feel the emotion of the film in the room, and that feeling is what he wanted to put in front of an audience. His warmest passage was about Prabhu. Before the Thoothukudi schedule, Prabhu rang him. “Thambi, do not eat anything. I am bringing food from home, and you are eating with me.” That, said the producer, with no expectation attached, is what he will remember, along with the many things the two of them argued about. Prabhu, for his part, thanked Nayanthara for calling him about the role, said his time on set with the late K. Bhagyaraj is something he will hold on to, and described watching Vishnu swing between laughing and pressure through the shoot. “Seeing him happy today, with this result, is a joy.”

Radikaa Sarathkumar has not seen the film yet. She came anyway, because in the present climate a film running well is hard enough that she wanted to applaud the people who managed it. She called Bhagyaraj a co-star who joked constantly and dispensed excellent advice from experience, named Prabhu her favourite fellow actor for his family’s hospitality and love of cinema, and said she saw Kavin’s future the moment she watched Dada. On Nayanthara: “She looks soft from the outside. Mentally and physically she is very strong.” Suhasini is in Hi for a single scene and said as much, then told the room something the veterans in it clearly agreed with: moments like this do not come often, so celebrate this one properly.

The younger bench got its turn. Qureshi, who has hosted plenty of these events as an anchor, was standing on the stage as an actor for once, playing the friend, and credited Vishnu with steering the shoot through rain, storm and flood; Prabhu, he said, never once let him feel like the new boy, and Radikaa is the one who teases everyone into laughing. Kavya, who plays Mythili, said she watched Radikaa in college and dreamed of becoming an actor like her, and has now shared a screen with her. Amrutha Srinivasan, who did not expect to be called up, called it the kind of feel-good film Tamil audiences wait for and said Vishnu had carved every frame with care.

Hi pairs Nayanthara and Kavin for the first time, with Prabhu, Radikaa Sarathkumar, Suhasini, VTV Ganesh, Sathyan, Adithya Kathir and Qureshi around them and Bhagyaraj in one of his final roles. Jen Martin composes, Rajesh Shukla shoots, Philomin Raj edits, and Nayanthara, Vignesh Shivan and S.S. Lalit Kumar produce. Rasagulla, sung by Anirudh, did the early lifting; the film is now in its second week.