From TV job to helming Rajinikanth-Kamal Haasan film: Nelson Dilipkumar’s 20-year climb

Television, though, was never his destination. In 2010, Nelson Dilipkumar got his first real shot at directing a feature film, a project called Vettai Mannan, with Silambarasan, Jai, Hansika Motwani and Deeksha Seth in the cast and music composed by Yuvan Shankar Raja. By most accounts, it had the makings of a solid commercial debut. Then, midway through production, it simply stopped. The reasons were never made fully public, and the film was shelved, leaving Nelson with a half finished project and no debut to show for years of effort. A second attempt to revive it in 2017, with composer Anirudh Ravichander stepping in, also went nowhere. For most people, two failed attempts at the same film might have been a sign to walk away from direction altogether. However, Nelson did not walk away.

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Instead, he wrote a new script, one built around a young woman forced into drug smuggling to fund her mother’s cancer treatment, mixing dark comedy with genuine emotional stakes. That film, Kolamaavu Kokila, became his actual directorial debut in 2018, with Nayanthara in the lead and Anirudh Ravichander, the same composer from his failed earlier attempt, helping push the project across the line.

The gamble paid off. The film did well at the box office, and got him noticed as one of the year’s more promising new directors, eight years after his first attempt at filmmaking collapsed.

What followed was a steady, almost methodical climb in scale. Doctor, with Sivakarthikeyan in the lead, became a commercial success in 2021 despite releasing in the thick of the pandemic, when theatres were operating under restrictions and audiences were still wary of stepping out. Beast, starring Vijay, arrived in 2022 which ended up among the year’s highest grossing Tamil films, proof that Nelson Dilipkumar’s instinct for what audiences wanted was sharper than what reviewers gave him credit for.

Then came Jailer in 2023, his first film with Rajinikanth, and the project that changed the scale of his career entirely. It crossed Rs 600 crore mark worldwide and ranked among the highest grossing Indian films of its time. More than the numbers, Jailer proved that Nelson could take on a star of Rajinikanth’s stature and still make a film that felt distinctly his own, rather than disappearing under the weight of the lead actor’s image.

Watch enough of his films back to back and a pattern emerges. Nelson Dilipkumar likes characters who are not entirely heroes or entirely villains, stories that sit somewhere between crime, comedy and emotion without settling fully into any one of them. He has spoken about admiring filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg and Guy Ritchie for their genre blending instincts, alongside Tamil cinema veterans such as K. Balachander and Mani Ratnam, whose work leaned heavily on character over spectacle. He has also pointed more than once to Breaking Bad as an influence, less for its violence and more for how it took an ordinary man and pushed him slowly into morally murky territory, a structure that echoes through Kolamaavu Kokila, Doctor, Beast and Jailer in different forms.

Today, Nelson Dilipkumar is juggling two of the heaviest assignments any Tamil director has been handed in recent memory. He is finishing Jailer 2, which brings him back to Rajinikanth on more familiar ground, while simultaneously preparing for KHxRK, where he will have to balance two screen legends, two enormous fan bases and decades of nostalgia in a single film. It is a long way from the writers’ desk at Vijay TV, where a young scriptwriter from Vellore was simply trying to get a reality show episode finished on deadline. The distance between that desk and this moment is, in many ways, the most interesting part of his story.