Rs 150 crore for Vishwanath & Sons: 'It gave me chills'

Venky Atluri got the number moments before he faced the room. A trade source had just told him Vishwanath & Sons had crossed Rs 150 crore. “When I heard it, I got chills,” the director said, six days after his Suriya family drama opened and kept growing through its first weekend. The team gathered in Chennai this week to say thank you to the two crowds that carried it there: the audiences who filled the shows and the press that met the film with warmth.

Suriya skipped the evening and still owned it. “We miss Suriya sir,” Mamitha Baiju said, keeping her turn short and asking anyone who has not seen the film yet to catch it in a theatre. Venky went further. When he narrated the story, he said, Suriya agreed to this family drama without a single question about scale or expectation. “That courage he carries by nature is the biggest reason for this success. And the love he has for his audience cannot be compared with anything.” G.V. Prakash Kumar filled in the wider picture: a record in Andhra for a Suriya film, a big overseas run, and a year that already holds two back-to-back blockbusters with a third film aimed at Diwali or the year end.

Radhika Sarathkumar gave the evening its best stretch of stories. During narration she kept interrupting Venky to ask whether Suriya had really agreed to act in those scenes. Then she issued a warning: “If the heroine in this film is not lovely, it will not run.” The search ended the day she visited the sets of Dude and saw Mamitha Baiju there; Sarathkumar vouched for her talent, and Venky soon called to say Mamitha was the one. Sarathkumar, she added, is the family’s designated fault-finder, the man who walks out of every film with a list of fixes. This one got “I love this movie.”

She went on to place the film in her own canon. Sooryavamsam was the great family film of its era, she said, and this is the one she has loved most since. She spent an hour with Sivakumar comparing it to Avan Aval Adhu, and met Kamal Haasan the day before the celebration, where the talk turned to how intelligent screenwriting deserves formal study and debate. Her highest praise went to the film’s spine: a hero whose whole world is his mother, the shock that follows her death, and his halting walk towards the relationships left behind. She loved Lucky Baskhar, she said, but this writing is smarter.

G.V. Prakash has now scored all three of Venky’s wins in a row: Vaathi, Lucky Baskhar and Vishwanath & Sons. “He has hit a hat-trick,” the composer said, crediting the Vaathi songs with winning him a National Award and opening the Telugu industry’s doors. The two most-shared songs from this album, he revealed, were composed in the final three days of work. He also confessed to crying alone at the console while scoring Radhika’s scenes, and called this her year as much as Suriya’s, with Thaikkizhavi and now this landing back to back. His own Suriya ledger reads Soorarai Pottru, Vishwanath & Sons and the film due at year end. “I believe our pair will hit a hat-trick too.”

Lyricist Balaji Venugopal climbed the stage in a new capacity. “For 23 years, talking has been my life. I have hosted thousands of shows, and I have stood on stages as a director. But this is the first time I stand here as a lyricist, and it is the most important stage of my life.” He wrote the songs with Arun Raja Kamaraj, their first time working together, and traced his G.V. Prakash friendship back to the Veyil days, when the young composer played him Urugudhe Marugudhe and asked whether the song would reach people. “Everyone knows how far he has reached. He is my aasaan more than my friend.” His Suriya story went further back, to a Ghajini-era interview the actor reached five minutes late because of a stubborn office lift, and apologised for anyway. “That grace stunned me. It is why lakhs of people still follow him.” Of the director he said simply: “What you watched is not Venky’s art. It is his heart. I read this screenplay a year ago and teared up at page after page.”

Bhavani Sre, who plays Meghna, remembered arriving on set terrified of sharing frames with the star she grew up watching. Suriya walked over, chatted normally, told her Meghna was a good character worth playing well, and the fear dissolved. She called Radhika and Mamitha the film’s two powerhouses, every scene of theirs strung like pearls, and filed the Ooty schedule under days she will not forget.

Venky saved his softest words for his team. Mamitha is “a pure soul, the sister I found, an actress who thinks about nothing except cinema.” G.V. Prakash, whom he nervously asked on day one of Vaathi whether to address as sir or bro, is now simply a brother, the kind who scraps a finished song without a flicker of irritation and refuses payment for the redo. And the film he brought to Tamil audiences, his first directed in the language, survived its scariest night at the press screening, where his legs shook until the credits rolled and the handshakes and hugs began. He signed off with a correction he wants every ticket-buyer to hear: “It is not Vishwanath & Sons. Keep supporting the Vishwanath family.”