Sundar C: I walked away from the Rajini-Kamal film

For years the public has assumed the Rajinikanth-Kamal Haasan-Sundar C film that fell apart in pre-production collapsed for some big reason: star egos, money, a rewrite. In a long sit-down with Behindwoods, Sundar C finally explained what actually happened, and the answer is unflattering to him.

“Too much pressure to handle,” he said. “I couldn’t stay true to the project, and at the same time, I realised I couldn’t do justice to the people who trusted me with such a massive responsibility. I felt it was better to step away right at the beginning.”

The structural admission underneath that sentence is striking from a man with thirty years of hits. Sundar C said he doesn’t know how to pitch his own scripts. “If I suddenly came and narrated the story of even my superhit films to you right now, you’d ask, ‘What kind of movie is this?’ Even if I narrated Aranmanai 4 to you, you wouldn’t like it.” For most of the last sixteen years he has avoided outside productions on principle. He works off a single image, a fragment that just arrives, and develops the rest of the film around it. The picture that became his first feature, he said, was a man stepping off a bus at an isolated house and asking a widowed woman for a job. There was no plot around it. That came later.

What doesn’t survive that process is the half before pre-production, where the script has to be sold to other people in the room. “I tend to get easily convinced and I compromise,” he said. “If someone says ‘no, it should be done this way,’ I might just agree. The person saying it could be an important figure, maybe the producer investing in the film, or a major artist playing a huge role. When that happens, I just say okay. I’m not someone who fights a lot.” On a project at the scale of Rajini and Kamal, he said, he could feel his own taste being rounded off in those meetings, and walked away rather than carry it through.

“Kamal sir didn’t step into the creative side of this film anywhere. The cause of the problem is Rajini sir. Oh, it’s not a ‘problem’, sir, I’m telling you the truth.”

He went further in the same breath. “Even now, he is ready for the next part. He himself told me, ‘Tell me whenever you want, we can do it.’” The two go back to Arunachalam, in 1997, when they would sit through scenes and dialogue together, daily. Thirty years later, all three men have changed; bringing all three onto a single creative line, he said, isn’t the same conversation it would have been then.

The script is still alive. Sundar C described it as “a Sundar C story starring Rajini sir,” a family-oriented break of the kind the actor has been signalling he wants. No politics in it, no swerve from Sundar C’s own style. He plans to make it whether or not Rajini eventually agrees on the same script.

The interview was framed around his entry into politics; he is contesting the Madurai seat for Vijay’s TVK, and confirmed he will leave directing behind if he wins. Mookuthi Amman 2 is finished. A film called Purushan is roughly three-quarters done. Beyond those, “by all means,” he told Behindwoods: anyone is free to write that Sundar C is leaving cinema.