Karthi says Sardar 2 aimed for 100 marks, not a pass

Karthi has a grading system for Tamil cinema, and he used it to explain what Sardar 2 is trying to do. “Most of us are happy with 40 marks, or 50,” he said at the film’s audio and trailer launch. “Only a few people decide they want the full 100. This team decided on 100, and writing for 100 is not easy.” He framed the stakes wider than one film: Tamil cinema, for him, is not just entertainment but the identity of Tamil Nadu. P.S. Mithran’s spy sequel opens on September 10.

What the film is actually about, he would only circle. “You may have gone on drinking water out of plastic bottles because you could not avoid it,” he said. “After this film, you will not be able to avoid what it tells you. We have put a truth about your health on screen that will shake you. That is the most important thing in the film.” He wants Sardar 2 to start an argument the way the first one did, the “much bigger war” he promised at the prologue launch, and credits Mithran’s habit of giving writers real respect and room for making the film dense enough to carry one. Suriya, who released the trailer, set the same bar from the other side: the first Sardar put a big debatable idea in front of people, and he expects the sequel to start a bigger fight.

He was funnier about his heroines. The first Sardar had a romance track, so when he heard part two was coming he expected the love story to scale up with everything else. “Then they said the heroine was Malavika Mohanan, and she looked like our own Monica Bellucci. I assumed there would be serious costumes and scenes for the fans to enjoy with her. When I asked the director, he said, sir, Sara is not that kind of character. Because in this film, Sara is my boss.” Ashika Ranganath, he said, is a superb dancer and a commercial heroine built for stardom. “In this film we mostly made her run. The director brought her in and tried to turn her into a serious actor.”

Suriya, coming off the biggest hit of his career, described stumbling onto the teaser without knowing it was out. “There was a fight in the dark. I thought I was watching some international film on Netflix. Then Karthi walks in, and I thought, hey, this is our film.” The trailer, he said, did the same thing to him again. He also credited the producer’s nerve: Lakshman Kumar and Karthi have been friends since school, and putting this much money into a film of this scale without thinking about the budget takes courage he wanted to acknowledge.

Yogi Babu, whom Karthi addresses only as Muruga (the greeting is returned in kind), gets a scene and rebuilds it until it lands, and Karthi put his consistency down to a rare combination: writing ability, a wish for the producer to stay solvent and a wish for the director to come out looking good. On S.J. Suryah he had the line of the night. “We now have a fresh villain from Tirunelveli. Everything he does in this film is a joy. He gives 100 percent in front of the camera and 500 percent in front of the mic. You can imitate his acting if you want. You can never copy his energy.”

Mithran refused to talk about the film itself. “The film should speak to people, not me.” He talked about how it got made instead, starting with the producer. Lakshman Kumar was the one who first floated a second Sardar, which makes it his dream project, and Mithran called the decision to build something this size in the current economic climate a serious act of nerve. He has spent six years with Prince Pictures and six with Karthi, and is the only director to have made two films in a row with him. Working with Karthi, he said, upgrades your sense of responsibility: when something comes out well, that is not enough for him, and he will tell you it can be better, which is how the whole shoot went.

He walked into S.J. Suryah’s house already certain of a yes, because he knew roughly what the actor would want. “I did not narrate the story to him as a director. I became S.J. Suryah and narrated it.” What he took from the collaboration was clarity: Suryah fights hard for every idea to land with the audience, and in his enthusiasm sends 17-minute WhatsApp voice notes about it. Mithran also placed him and editor Vijay Velu Kutty in the same species. “You tell them both, enough, enough. One says, I will act it another way. The other says, I will cut it another way.”

Ashika was asked to play Gen Z, and after the costume team had made its picks she told the director, happily, that she would act in what she found comfortable. What Mithran values more is that she rehearses her Tamil lines in Tamil. Karthi’s double role meant he played Vijay Prakash as himself and Sardar under makeup, and since Ashika’s character shares scenes with both, she shot everything twice. Malavika got no such warm-up. Mithran had watched Thangalaan and decided she could handle action, so her very first day on set was a stunt sequence with a fall from sixty or seventy feet. She hesitated, then gave the team everything. Her own telling matches his: she walked in, was told to jump, and the crew’s support carried her through. “Filmmaking is a collective art. It is not a one-man show,” she said. “I had drawn my own limits as an actor. This film pushed them wider and got a different performance out of me.”

Sardar 2 is Sam CS’s 100th film, and his speech went back to the beginning. He had once gone to a studio in Chennai to sing, was made to wait seven hours, and was then told he did not have the voice for it. The rejections and humiliations kept coming for years. “Standing at the launch of my 100th film, the journey feels very long and very painful. But with God and the people behind me I believe I have reached somewhere in music.” He is proud that Karthi is the star of the milestone, and said Mithran, who knows his ragas and his notes, is the director he has enjoyed working with most. The two of them sat together for the background score. Mithran’s account of him is a man who has never said the word no. “Okay brother, don’t worry is the sentence I have heard most from Sam.” When Mithran finished narrating the story, the composer told him it would be a hit even if he just told it to people. A hundred films, Mithran pointed out, is 800 reels of music. “You are the real inspiration. You are the champion.”

The most personal beat in Karthi’s speech was about the man sitting in the audience. Sivakumar, he said, has never once asked to hear a story his son was considering. “He let me listen, choose, and go fight it out on my own. I used to wonder why he never guided me. He was a hero himself, and not one day did he ask what the story was, where the shoot was, who the director was. I think that was the biggest freedom I was ever given.”

Lakshman Kumar’s own image for the film was the giant temple chariot of Thiruvarur: pulled all the way here and handed over to the fans. “This is our dream project. The person who built it to this level of quality is my Great Wall of China, Karthi.” When Mithran narrated the story, he said, the scale was already visible, and the director has delivered it with emotion, not just fight sequences. Karthi returned the credit: dreams can be written on paper any way you like, but making them this big needs a producer who believes in the story, and without Lakshman Kumar and co-producer Venkatesh, “our dream would not have come true.”

The evening drew a long bench of the industry. Sivakumar, Nasser, Chinni Jayanth, Ravi Mohan, Kavin and Sundar C were there, alongside directors Mohan Raja, next in line at Prince Pictures with Karthi, Thamizh and Rathna Kumar, producer D.G. Thiyagarajan, stunt choreographer Dhilip Subbarayan and editor Vijay Velu Kutty.

George C. Williams has shot the film, Vijay Velu Kutty has edited it and Rajeevan handled the production design. Rajisha Vijayan, Yogi Babu, Achyuth Kumar, Balaji Sakthivel, Ashish Vidyarthi, Nizhalgal Ravi, Devadarshini, Jean Paul Lal and Babu Antony fill out a cast that Mithran built around real events from around fifty years ago.

Karthi’s closing pitch was to the people who have waited. “For three years I have tested my fans’ patience. This time I have left nothing out. I have gone all in.” Sardar 2 opens in theatres on September 10 in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam and Kannada.