Kamal Haasan still wants to be Singeetam's assistant director

Kamal Haasan walked into the Sing Geetham celebration in Chennai with one regret, that nobody had asked him sooner. “You should have told me at least three, four months back,” he said. “I would have been standing on the stage along with those boys.” At 71, talking about a 94-year-old director, he was not paying respects from a distance. He was asking to be let back into the team.

The film is Singeetam Srinivasa Rao’s 61st, a musical fantasy releasing June 11, produced by Nag Ashwin through Vyjayanthi Movies and Swapna Cinema, with Devi Sri Prasad scoring his first film for the veteran. Ayaan and Ahilya Bamroo lead it, set in a village called Kubera Puram. But for the man who has shared more screen-time of his life with Singeetam than almost anyone, the occasion was never going to be about the synopsis.

Kamal reached back to the very start. He was 21, working as what he called an inadvertent, wanton assistant director, when the two first orbited each other. Their first film together began as a casual promise in Bombay, sealed after a Filmfare night at the Taj, where Singeetam told him two stories. One was called Advaita. That one became a film. The other they kept circling for decades and never made. “Nearly 45 years ago,” Kamal said. “I was 20 when we were talking about it. Now I’m 71, and I see this movie.” Some ideas, he added, are simply ageless, “and hence, age is just a number. Like take two, take three, take four.”

Much of his speech was a walk through the films they made in between, told as the in-jokes of two people who had been in the trenches together. He has spoken this way before about the collaborators who shaped him, most movingly in his farewell to writer Crazy Mohan; here the man was still in the room. Advaita eventually turned into Pushpak, the dialogue-free classic they shot, to their own enormous pride, entirely inside an air-conditioned five-star hotel. “Others praised us for doing the movie without dialogues, but we were happy working in AC,” he laughed, recalling how he would brush his teeth, rehearse, bathe, comb his hair, and then “take one begins.” Pushpak cost 15 lakhs. “The day we made Pushpak, we felt like we made 150 crores,” he said, and then turned it into a point about the industry, that cinema is passion first and business second, and that the trade had quietly inverted the order, the same conviction behind his recent open letter asking the industry to cut its excess.

He told the story of Apoorva Sagodharargal too, the film whose first 20 days of footage the two of them scrapped because they could feel it sliding toward failure. They alone answered for the money already spent, and they alone carried the tension of the rescue. Mumbai Express, shot under a punishing Bombay sun with no permissions, he remembered as the first digital film captured on 720p. None of these, he insisted, were failures, whatever the box office said. “Ask us.”

Then there was the name itself. For 40 years in Kodambakkam, people mangled it into “Sangeetham,” and the director hated it. “No. It is Singeetam. Please,” Kamal said. The film’s title, Sing Geetham, finally fixes the pronunciation in lights. “Now nobody will call him Sangeetham. For me, that name itself is music.”

Singeetam, for his part, kept it short and pointed the credit outward. With God’s blessings, he said, the project had Nag Ashwin and Vyjayanthi behind it, and the globally acclaimed younger director was the person chiefly responsible for bringing the film to life. He thanked Devi Sri Prasad for his work, thanked his assistants and crew, and thanked Kamal simply for showing up. “We have shared many wonderful experiences together.”

Kamal closed by collapsing the whole 45-year distance into a single wish. He does not see the film as something another company produced. “I feel like I have produced it,” he said, “and at least Mr. Nagi knows I feel like a co-producer.” More than that, he wants to keep learning from a man who is “always ahead of Gen Z.” His ask was small and serious at once: to be Singeetam’s assistant director again, just to stay in that state of mind. “Sing along with Singeetam.”

Sing Geetham opens in cinemas worldwide on June 11.