Whenever Kamal gets together with a hot director, there is talk of problems between them. But in most cases, the output indicates the contrary. Remember Indhian?

Vaettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu, with Gautham wielding the megaphone, released recently. This would be a good time to re-visit the uncut version of an interview with Gautham published quite some time ago. Excerpts:

• …lots of stuff happened between me and him because of the production. He was pissed off with change in producer, the film was not taking off, his time was getting delayed all. He was very unhappy and hesitant initially. He was like “Bunch of kids, what they gonna make” and stuff like that. He kept to himself mostly. So I’ll give him the scene, he’ll take a look at it and he’ll act. He’ll make a couple of changes… Simple ones, like “Can I hook this line and this line?” He would tell me when you write, you tend to write a little more. “You can cut this line.” So I take stuff from him. He let me handle it. I can never say he bossed over.
• …when you see somebody peforming that to the hilt… To the T… you realise it’s awesome. And, he gives you much more than that. Certain expressions of his, you can never write. He would do something different for every scene. But we kept him totally subtle throughout.
• It was a beautiful experience working with him because I learnt a lot in terms a lot on how my writing should be. Like, how an actor’s expression should be written, which we don’t tend to do because we write in the classic screenplay format.

Thanks, Sudhish!