There is no doubt that many Ajith Kumar fans would pick Yennai Arindhaal as their favourite film starring their matinee idol. In fact, Ajith’s Good Bad Ugly director Adhik Ravichandran mentioned the Gautham Menon directorial as one of his favourites too. However, not many know that this wasn’t the film Ajith and Gautham were originally set to collaborate on.
In an interview with Cue Studio, Gautham revealed that he was called by team Ajith Kumar to work on a completely different movie. “In fact, I was approached to do the remake of the Hindi film, Race. While I didn’t want to do a remake, I didn’t want to let go off the opportunity. So, I took a month’s time to work on the script, and I gave him another story,” said Gautham.
Recalling how he narrated the story of Yennai Arindhaal to Ajith, Gautham Menon said, “I simply told Ajith that this was a film about a retired cop who has a daughter that is not his own, and it is about how he comes back into the force for a particular reason. He liked it a lot, and then, I worked on it. So yeah, Yennai Arindhaal was purely made for Ajith.”
Although Ajith has acted in multiple remakes, the Race remake would have indeed been a solid addition to his filmography. The film had the right amount of suaveness and grey shades for every character. Considering how Ajith had a proclivity for grey-shaded characters in that phase of his career, and his penchant for fast cars and chase sequences, Abbas-Mustan’s Race, headlined by Saif Ali Khan, Akshaye Khanna, Katrina Kaif, and Bipasha Basu, would have been right up his alley.
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Nevertheless, Yennai Arindhaal became the only collaboration between Ajith and Gautham Menon, and it marks one of the finest chapters in both their careers. Interestingly enough, Ajith and Gautham have a box-office clash of sorts this week as the former’s Good Bad Ugly is set to hit the screens on April 10, alongside Mammootty’s Bazooka, which features the Minnale director in a pivotal role.
