If you were to meet Sundar C., expecting him to be as funny as his films, you might be a bit disappointed. Despite his warmth as a host, he says he “hates” giving interviews (“I hope you spare me questions like who I preferred directing, Rajini or Kamal?”). He’s an introvert who’s most comfortable at home, “watching at least one film a day.”
He isn’t kidding about his ‘homebodiness’. He says he feels like crying if film shoots extend beyond 6 p.m. “For a horror film like Aranmanai 2 , didn’t you notice how much of it was set indoors, even the night scenes? They were all shot in the day so I could go back home early.”
It’s this habit of rushing back home to watch his “film of the day” that led to Muthina Kathirikai . He chose to watch the Malayalam hit Vellimoonga without hearing much about it. “What I loved most was how the film was so “Bhagyaraj-esque”. Films like that hardly get made anymore. So I just had to buy its remake rights immediately. The decision to play the lead in Muthina Kathirikai happened later.”
He says acting ranks much below directing. “Several roles I’ve acted in were just stand-ins for actors we didn’t get. In films like Aranmanai , I only did roles that didn’t require a big star. Even Thalai Nagaram (his debut as an actor) was me helping out my assistant Suraj, when dates with other actors fell through... it helped that I’d just lost 15 kg though.”
Despite his segues into production and distribution, directing has remained his first love. He says he’s come a long way from being a director “for hire” to a director who only made films of his choice. It also helped that audiences have become more susceptible to experiments in comedy. “It’s only now that we can look beyond just the one star comedian to bring in the laughs. We have so many good comedians today and we can make entertainers with comic actors playing all the characters in a film, including that of the villain.”
When asked if he would ever prefer making a serious film to a comedy, he says, “What’s the challenge in making serious films anyway? All you just need to do is stick to the script and you will have your movie. But comedies are 80 per cent improvisation. So we get nothing if the jokes don’t work on the sets. In Winner , the cult scene where Vaidvelu gets beaten by Riyaz Khan, where he says ‘ Naan azhuthiruven (I’ll cry)’, was shot in two parts, with a gap of one year in between, because we didn’t get an appropriate punch-line to end the scene.”
Sundar C. has done well with comedies. “There was a time when Ullathai Allitha was declared a flop. It was being taken off theatres and I thought my career was over. Kushboo was shooting in Ooty, so I decided to go there to tell her that we should break up, as I felt I wouldn’t be able to give her any luxuries as a husband. Just as I waited for her to come back from the shoot, I started getting calls telling me the film had started doing well. On the same day, theatres had gone from being empty to house-full across the State. When she came back in the evening, she asked me why I’d come to visit in such a hurry. I said it was to celebrate the film’s victory. It’s like I’d become Nagaraja Cholan MLA.”
