It was important for him to first understand the connection between Sivakarthikeyan and the voice before choreographing the stunts. “I heard the script and had a full description of what the director wanted to see. I also had to be mindful of the exact moments the voice begins speaking to SK.” The sequence sees Sathya (Sivakarthikeyan) face the same flat engineer that he detests and tries to stab with a pencil a few moments earlier. But this time, he attacks, with helpful prompts (that tell him to duck, shield and punch).
Yannick, known for his work in stylish actioners such as The Family Man and Gautham Vasudev Menon’s Vendhu Thanindhadhu Kaadu, worked on a pre-viz or a previsualisation video with his team in France before filming on set. “A previz or a is when you create an action choreography, shoot and edit it with your team away from set. I showed this to the director so he could see how the stunts were going to play out even before filming.”
Since much of the sequence is essentially Sathya punching on command, how much of it was in the script? “Before going into previz, the director told me the kind of action he was expecting. For instance, he told me things like “This punch comes from the left and you see SK blocking it because of the voice.” The next task was to see how I could place these stunts in the freshest ways possible.” And he achieved this through various styles (including kickboxing, boxing and projection movements) and the swirling, Dutch camera angles that surrounds Sivakarthikeyan.