At the time, Shankar Shanmugam was a promising associate director working under the legendary filmmaker S. A. Chandrasekhar. He had a head full of technical ideas, a passion for slick storytelling, and a burning desire to break away from the standard masala template. His mentor gave him a piece of advice that would change Tamil cinema forever: "Go make your own film."
The result was Gentleman , released in the summer of 1993. On the surface, Gentleman had a quintessentially ‘90s premise: a poor, honest college principal (played by the late, great Sarathkumar) leads a double life as a mysterious, hooded thief named "Gentleman," who steals from the corrupt rich to fund educational scholarships for the underprivileged. Meanwhile, a cunning cop (Goundamani in a rare serious-role-turned-comic-relief) tries to unmask him.
As Shankar himself later said, “I didn’t know what I couldn’t do. So I tried everything.”
Thirty years later, that “everything” is exactly why we still call him “Director Shankar.” And it all started with a Gentleman .
Before the larger-than-life sets of Enthiran , before the social commentary of Anniyan , and before the cinematic spectacle of Indian , there was a modestly budgeted 1993 action-comedy about a look-alike vigilante. That film, Gentleman , was the moment director Shankar first pressed the accelerator on a career that would redefine Indian commercial cinema.