A film set usually has a short life: it is built, used for a few weeks or months, and eventually dismantled once filming is complete. But the massive set created for Vijay’s Jana Nayagan has been given a rather unusual fate.
Director H Vinoth has revealed that the makers decided to retain the elaborate set instead of pulling it down after the film’s shoot. The reason, he said, was to allow other filmmakers, particularly smaller productions, to make use of the existing infrastructure rather than spend heavily on constructing similar sets.
According to Vinoth, around 95 per cent of Jana Nayagan was filmed on the set, which was used for everything from dialogue portions to songs and action sequences. He said the team had discussed making the set useful beyond their own film and eventually decided to leave it intact. “We wanted this film set to be useful for many other films, so we decided to keep the set intact without dismantling it,” Vinoth said in an interaction with Cineulagam.
The director credited producer Venkat K Narayana for taking the idea forward. According to Vinoth, KVN Productions specifically instructed the team not to dismantle the structure after filming. The decision could prove particularly useful for productions that cannot afford to build large-scale sets from scratch.
The set itself was versatile enough to double up as several locations in the film. Vinoth revealed that the villain’s introduction and the interval sequence were among the portions shot there, even though the story takes the characters to different parts of the world. The scale of the production has previously been highlighted by the team, with the set reportedly taking months to construct and being repeatedly redressed for different portions of the film. Jana Nayagan was directed by H Vinoth and marked Vijay’s final acting outing before he shifted his focus to politics.
