How Sudha Kongara turned a corporate tale into a ₹100 crore film

Much like her mentor Mani Ratnam, a director she holds in great esteem, Sudha Kongara makes no bones that she is a true-blue commercial film director. From the time she started making films in the early 2000s, Kongara also deliberately steered clear of making women-centric films wary of being bracketed as a female director in the extremely male-dominated world of Tamil cinema.

So, she deliberately sought out stories with strong male protagonists like a tale of two squabbling small-time local gangsters in Drohi, a cynical, foul-mouthed boxing coach in Irrudhi Suttru or a male entrepreneur fighting all odds to realise his passionate dream of starting a low-cost airline.

In Soorarai Pottru, (which bagged a series of national awards) she took a corporate tale inspired by a memoir, ‘Simply Fly: A Deccan Odyssey’ by Captain Gopinath, the founder of the now-defunct Air Deccan, and adapted it into a super successful movie. With this film, which released in 2020 on Amazon Prime and officially made ₹100 crores, Kongara effectively smashed the glass ceiling in male-dominated Kollywood.

Soorarai Pottru catapulted her into the top league as a bankable commercial director. Producers and actors are lining up to make films with her. Besides the Hindi remake of Soorarai Pottru that she is currently shooting in Mumbai with Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar, she has signed up a multi-lingual film with KGF-2 producers and also has a web series on south India’s first female doctors and the horrifying discrimination they had to face.

Kongara, who openly admits to having a chip on her shoulder to being referred to as a female director, has always said it is important for to make it in mainstream commercial space to get her voice heard. To be one of the boys, as it were. She has no pretensions about the kind of cinema she makes, and frankly admits that she is in films to entertain.

Also read: Soorarai Pottru: How a sparrow inspires an entrepreneur to soar like an eagle

But, Kongara ensures that her female characters are strong women who are not just adorning the screen for their looks. In fact, Tamil director Arun Matheswaran (Rocky and Saani Kaiyadham fame), who knows Kongara for a long time and has even worked with her to write the Tamil dialogues of Irudhi Suttru, says that most of her female characters are based on the tough-talking director herself. The characters in her film are very much like who Sudha is in real life and the challenges she has come across in her own life and fought them, says Matheswaran.

Ironically, Kongara’s first film Drohi flopped badly at the box-office and she was in the doldrums. Her confidence was shaken. But, it was Mani Ratnam, with whom she had worked as an assistant (having been involved in the making of his film, Aayutha Ezhuthu) for six years, who told her to pull herself up (having been in that zone as well in his long career) and get back out there. “It was Mani sir, who told me to stop whining and get out there and make another film,” she says in an interview. And, Kongara took up the challenge and did the hit sports film, Irudhi Suttru.

It’s this spirit of taking on challenges that she recognized in Captain GR Gopinath. Always championing the cause of the underdog, she was drawn to his passion and determination to give a chance for every Indian to fly in an aeroplane. Captain Gopinath had told The Federal that his biography, Simply Fly, was largely written for rural youth. “I wrote the book to tell young people not to become cynical or skeptical. And, to believe you don’t need money or connections to succeed in this country. It helps to have all of that but if you are possessed by a dream and if you have shraddha (sincerity and faith) – you can win,” he said.

Captain Gopinath, who was very happy with the way the film had turned out, had told Kongara the same thing when she met him for his approval to make a film on his story.

“Young people need to be told that if they dream hard enough, they can realise their dream,” he told her, And, so Kongara just focussed on that part of his book that dealt with a village schoolteacher’s son Gopinath’s struggles and frustrations and how he overcomes them and did not venture into other areas of the entrepreneur’s life.

She concentrated on telling how his corporate rivals play dirty games to ensure he doesn’t get his airline license or airports to land his aircraft. Corrupt bureaucrats toe the line of rich airline owners and toy with him without giving him the license. But, each time, the protagonist (played by Suriya, in a career defining role as Maara) outwits them with his ingenuity (using defunct airstrips to land his aircraft, for example) and manages to get his airline business off the ground.

Also read: Sudha Kongara ‘ecstatic’; Soorarai Pottru to be screened in theatre on July 23 for Suriya’s birthday

The last scene shows a bemused, teary-eyed old village woman emerging from an aircraft that has just landed, happy to have finally realised her dream to fly before she dies. And, his two friends and partners in his business hug Surya to say: namma jeichitom maara. Which is what an “ecstatic” Kongara told The Federal after her film won a slew of national awards.

Kongara’s biggest asset as a filmmaker is her ability to get to the emotional core of even an aviation story and make it into an absorbing, entertaining film. But, Kongara admits that she deliberately tapped into the emotional angle of the story – on Gopinath’s passion, “on why the man gave such a damn about wanting every Indian to fly in an aeroplane”. That is the exact feeling she pegged her film on and with the help of carefully etched-out characters among other factors, she managed to strike a chord in people.