Vijay told his son to build his own name. The interview is all about Vijay.

Jason Sanjay has avoided interviews for most of the years he has been old enough to give them. Sigma has ended that. His debut as a director is close enough to release for the promotional round to start, and the long conversation he has now given is travelling much further than the trailer did. Very little of what is travelling is about the film.

The reason is his father. Vijay is no longer only the biggest star in Tamil cinema, he is the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, and that turns any sentence his son says about home into a headline. Jason opened with it rather than waiting to be walked there.

“It is a historic revolution that has taken place,” he said of the TVK sweep. “Because of this, whether it is me, my sister or my entire family, we have all received an additional responsibility and legacy to carry forward. We also need to safeguard it. We will have to be extremely careful and cautious.”

Careful and cautious is a strange register for a first-time director on a promotional tour, when the job is usually to be loud. It is also the only honest one available to him. Every frame of Sigma will be read as a statement about a government, whether or not it contains one.

The advice he keeps returning to is older than the election. When he settled on cinema, Vijay told him not to borrow the name he already had. “He wanted me to build my own identity and name,” Jason said. “What worked best for both of us was that we were thinking along the same lines.” Help was on offer with a condition attached, which was that Jason had to go and ask for it. “He told me, ‘I would not come and ask you what you want.’” He said his father never spoon-fed him and pushed him towards ground-level experience instead, and that he is thankful to him, to his mother and to the rest of the family.

He also reads what is written about all of them. “Sometimes, there are positive narratives and other times, not-so-positive ones,” he said. “I often go through these posts and comments. Some people want to encourage me, while others start criticising our personalities and family. They make assumptions about us. There is a lot of love, legacy and responsibility because of my family.”

He named no assumption in particular and did not need to. His parents’ marriage has been in front of the Chengalpattu family court since Sangeetha Sornalingam filed for divorce under the Special Marriage Act, a case that came up for hearings through this year, and nobody in the family has spoken about it publicly. That silence is holding. What Jason offered instead was a general shrug at strangers writing about people they have not met, which is as close to the subject as anyone in that house has come.

The warmest stretch of the interview is also about a parent. Asked about his mother, he described a surveillance operation. “My mom is like a spy. Whenever I try to do something secretly or hang out without telling anyone, I always get caught.” The illustrating anecdote involves a car he took one night without telling anyone, a phone that stayed switched off, a family close to filing a missing complaint, and a return home the next morning that went about as well as expected.

He has been in a Vijay film already. At eight or nine he turned up in Naan Adicha Thaanga Maatta from Vettaikaaran, and remembers almost nothing technical about it. “I just wore the costume, and when they said action, I ran and hugged my Appa,” he said. Those shooting memories return to him now when he directs. On the question of whether the dancing carried over, he was firm. “Dance comes only with practice. I am not a natural dancer. Please don’t compare me with my father.”

Then came the hypothetical that has done the most numbers. If Jason Statham watched Sigma and offered him a Hollywood film, which Indian actor would he take along? Vijay, first thought, no deliberation, and he would like Statham to know it.

So the interview has a shape. A debut director who was told to make a name of his own, promoting the film that is supposed to make it, turning towards his father in nearly every answer. In fairness, so did every question.

Sigma stars Sundeep Kishan and is produced by Lyca Productions, releasing in Tamil and Telugu, with a trailer that has already done well for a first-time director’s film. It was slotted for 31 July and moved off that date once Jana Nayagan took over the theatres in late July. Jason also appears in one of the songs, which means the first time most audiences see him on screen since he was nine will be inside a frame he set up himself.