Not only did he give Bollywood its first Rs 100-crore hit, Ghajini, in 2008, he also became the first in the country to score two Rs 100-crore blockbusters in a year—in 2014. Even better, his commercial success hasn't come at the cost of a strong social message. Meet AR Murugadoss, Tamil cinema's Midas man
Kallakurichi, a small town around 200 kilometres southwest of Chennai, did not have an adequate government school. AR Murugadoss, who was born and raised there, studied in a school without a compound wall and a proper classroom. There was no railway station either. The town, obviously lacking in much, however had two reasonably good cinema halls, which were also its only source of entertainment. It stands to reason that Murugadoss, at a young age, would become interested in the movies. It is also self-evident that the early exposure would have helped shape the 42-year-old filmmaker’s sharp understanding of what his audiences—really, really—want. And the proof of his acumen is in the numbers. Here are the facts.
In 2008, his maiden Hindi film Ghajini—a remake of his own 2005 Tamil psychological thriller—starring Aamir Khan became the first Bollywood movie to gross Rs 100 crore in collections (source: boxofficeindia.com).
His last three films, Thuppakki (2012, in Tamil), Holiday (Hindi) and Kaththi (Tamil), have been similar blockbusters. In fact, he is the only director in the country to have scored two Rs 100 crore hits (Holiday and Kaththi) in a year and that too in two different languages. You could call 2014 the year of Murugadoss and the reason why he finds himself ranked 39 in the 2014 Forbes India Celebrity 100 (having not even made the cut last year).
With his slight build and a soft-spoken and shy demeanour, it is easy to lose Murugadoss in a crowd. But put him behind a camera and he knows how to make his presence felt. “When you make a movie, you are actually playing a game with your audience. Every scene must give out something new while, at the same time, get them [the audience] to guess what will happen next,” he tells Forbes India. Sitting, legs folded, in his spartan office in Saligramam in Chennai, Murugadoss lets us in on his simple formula: “A good film is one where the audience fails to guess correctly.” And he would know.
Murugadoss’s ability as a storyteller surfaced early, when he began to write short stories during his college days in Trichy in Tamil Nadu. Most of them even got published in Tamil magazines. But, when his application for admission to the Madras Film Institute—one of the two premier film institutes in the country at the time, Pune being the other—was rejected, Murugadoss was hurt. “What hurt more was the fact that I was rejected by the panel in three minutes, without them looking into the short stories that I had written,” he recalls with a tinge of lingering disappointment. But, as it often transpires, this rejection proved to be a blessing in disguise.
At that point, Murugadoss, who was in his early twenties, began to assist veteran script writer P Kalaimani, who had penned some of the best known Tamil hits of the 1980s such as 16 Vayathinile, Mann Vasanai and Muthal Vasantham. Murugadoss’s work with Kalaimani was menial—it involved serving food and liquor and taking copious notes. But the two-year stint also proved to be an education in the art of scriptwriting and the fundamentals of making a commercial film.
“Looking back, I realise that had I gone to the film institute, I would have learnt more about the art of filmmaking and less about writing a strong script,” he says. “The technical aspect of filmmaking is a team effort and I can overcome that shortcoming by employing experts in the field.”
Aalif Surti, chief creative officer, Fox Star Studios, agrees: “Murugadoss is primarily a storyteller and technique comes next.” Surti and Murugadoss have a close working relationship as Fox Star Studios and AR Murugadoss Productions have jointly produced four Tamil films; the fifth one has just gone on the floor. “His style is like that of Raju Hirani—take up an issue-based subject, package it around entertainment and style, and deliver it in a manner that reaches the audience best,” says Surti, underscoring the reason why Murugadoss himself pens the script for all his movies.
Not just that. As his son struggled to find a break, Arumugam constantly wrote letters motivating Murugadoss not to give up. “But for his letters and words, I would have given up and gone back home,” says Murugadoss. It was five years before Murugadoss’s name first appeared in the titles of a film (as an assistant director for a Tamil movie Madhura Meenakshi) and his father took a two-hour bus ride to Salem (a bigger town) to watch the film. “Initially I lived on the Rs 400 my father sent me every month. Then, as assistant director, I began to earn enough to sustain myself but could not send any money home,” says Murugadoss. “My father married off my three elder sisters without taking any help from me.”
(This story appears in the 26 December, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)