What makes a good sequel? For filmmaker PS Mithran, it begins with the characters. His favourite sequel, after all, is Terminator 2, for how it builds on the character arcs established in the first film. “In the Terminator films, Sarah Connor and John Connor are the characters that bring some depth to the story. So a great sequel should have good character continuity, be it Avatar, Rocky Balboa, or Fast and Furious.” And Mithran now hopes that his upcoming film, Sardar 2, starring Karthi, will be a good sequel to his 2022 spy thriller. The director admits he isn’t in a calm state of mind in the days leading up to the release. “The final mixing is going on. So what we are experiencing now are the last few days of labour pains.”
Mithran thought of an idea for a sequel to Sardar while shooting a prison sequence in the film. “I always end my films with an open ending, and while shooting Sardar, I realised the titular character had a lot of unexplored potential to tap into. I could tell a lot of stories about him.” However, since he had to focus on shooting Sardar, he didn’t give the sequel idea any further thought. “Then, after the release, when Karthi sir and I were flying back to Chennai from Hyderabad, we discussed the idea for Sardar 2, and I started building that storyline.”
Mithran felt exhausted thinking about Sardar — remember, this is a character that has been on his mind since before the pandemic. “So I took a break from Sardar, and I even did three other scripts.” But everything changed once he cracked SJ Suryah’s antagonist character. We have seen Suryah play negative roles recently; however, this is a script tailor-made for him, says Mithran. “He is who he is because of his histrionics. We can’t cut that out of him. We can alter the meter of his performance, which is what I have done; you will see both a subtle Suryah and a quintessential Suryah in Sardar 2.”
SJ Suryah and Karthi in a still from ‘Sardar 2’
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Special Arrangment
Interestingly, like Suryah, Mithran has worked with quite a few other actors — like Vishal, Karthi, Nasser, and Arjun — who are drawn to filmmaking. “These actors will be empathetic to the shooting process and the artistic goals of a director. Sometimes they will understand certain things without any explanation. The experience will be very collaborative,” says Mithran.
The trailer for Sardar 2 promises a high-stakes spy-actioner with grandeur, suspense and genre pleasures. Interestingly, however, the three-minute promo is the latest example of a recent trend of long trailers that reveal much of the plot. “Firstly, in the age of social media, the whole concept of surprise is valid for one show. Even before the second show, the entire story of the film will come out. So what’s the point of hiding it all?” wonders Mithran, adding that it is no longer viable to do thrillers that fully rely on that one twist in the tale. “At the end of the day, I have written a good story, and I want to sell my film with that story. That is why it is better to tell the story. This is how Hollywood promotes a lot of films — most trailers will give you an idea of the beginning, middle and end.”
PS Mithran and Karthi on the sets of ‘Sardar 2’
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Special Arrangment
Speaking of Hollywood, the story of Sardar shares quite a few parallels with Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, a film and a filmmaker Mithran is a huge fan of. Akin to the climax of the 2008 film, Sardar ends up taking the blame on himself after the death of a once-good character (Rathore, played by Chunky Panday). So you naturally wonder if Sardar is Mithran’s second crack at the superhero genre after his Sivakarthikeyan-starrer Hero. “I think spies are inherently superheroes. What I like about The Dark Knight is the humanness of the superhero. When it comes to spies, they are real superheroes in real life. The whole concept of a spy is to remain hidden; further, he is not going to wear a cape, and he is not going to do any theatrics. He will be hidden in the crowd as a silent watcher who silently saves people and walks off.” But it wasn’t Nolan who inspired Mithran. “I personally would feel that the ending of Sardar is very similar to that of Irumbu Thirai, and while writing the Irumbu Thirai climax, I was inspired by Mad Max. In that film, when Furiosa rises in the elevator of the Citadel, our hero would vanish into the crowd as an unsung hero.”
After its release, Sardar received mixed reception, and Mithran realised the demography of his audience was too wide and dynamic. “I realised we can’t make a film that will satisfy everyone, but we can have portions in the film that will satisfy everyone. Many had a lot of problems with the first 40 minutes of Sardar. But those who grew up watching Tamil films from 2005-2010 didn’t have many issues with those first 40 minutes but had an issue with the last 30 minutes. If a section of the audience said the second half moved at a brisk pace, another group said they couldn’t understand it. So balancing all these expectations was a task in Sardar 2.”
The upcoming film will also have genre pleasures that appeal to spy-film fans, says Mithran. Writing and shooting some of these ideas — like using a railway station ticket to arrange a meeting in Sardar — gives him a high. “When I started approaching Sardar as a spy film, I wanted to explore that genre with those things that are visible to our eyes. Usually, if it’s a spy film, we would immediately think of some mystical place hidden somewhere or a hidden island where the villain is hiding. I wanted to make a spy film without all that.” In Sardar 2, however, Mithran has scaled up and tried some of those larger-than-life ideas as well.
PS Mithran on the sets of ‘Sardar 2’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangment
Apart from being a spy thriller, Sardar also had a vein of social consciousness — the film spoke of the dangers of using plastic water bottles and privatisation of water. Mithran, however, doesn’t want to be tagged as a ‘socially responsible’ filmmaker. “Some people I meet have even asked me, ‘What topic are you going to touch next?’ That scares me because I never start a film with a topic in mind. While the story is forming in my head, some topic might be running through my mind, and sometimes that topic can organically fit into the story.”
That said, he stresses how spies have historically brought about changes socially and politically. “John Perkins’s ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’ is a major inspiration for me; it’s a book about how, through building one dam, the CIA was able to take over a whole country.” Sardar 2, he adds, also has one such aspect.
Currently, Mithran is in talks with a few producers for his next film. “I can’t say what it is about, but it definitely won’t be another spy thriller.”
Sardar 2 releases in theatres on September 10
Published – September 07, 2026 03:26 pm IST
