India — Chethan D’Souza Says Mohanlal Drove the “Jailer 2” Car Into the Jet Himself, and the Rajinikanth–Hrithik Beat Was Blocked on the Page
- Chethan D’Souza was the action director on “Jailer 2.”
- He says Mohanlal drove the car into a departing private jet himself, at top speed.
- He says the Rajinikanth and Hrithik Roshan sequence was planned shot by shot so neither actor lost the frame.
Posted: October 26, 2026
D’Souza’s description of how a big Tamil action picture gets made is a scheduling argument as much as a creative one. On a film this size the action is written and blocked before anyone reaches the floor, because the two scarce resources are the lead’s available days and the margin for error on the day. Emotion, build-up and action are planned to run together rather than being stitched after the fact, which is what lets a unit shoot a sequence inside the window a star is actually there for.
The division of labour between live work and post is the useful detail. D’Souza puts the explosions, and the car’s impacts with a truck and with the plane, in the column that gets handled with technology — those are not things you run for real with a lead inside the vehicle. What he says was shot live is Mohanlal driving the car at top speed into the shot of the jet taking off, under his direction. That is the ordinary split on a set with a working action department: the performer carries the part that can be rehearsed and controlled, and the part that cannot be made repeatable gets built rather than risked.
Designing for a specific actor is the other constraint he names. He plans around age and physical capability first and then shapes the action so it still reads as convincing on camera — which, for stars, often means the coverage is carrying style and bearing rather than technical fighting. The Rajinikanth and Hrithik Roshan meeting was handled the same way, with the balance set in the script and refined on the floor: the vehicle’s arrival and impact, the step down out of it, and the shots that follow were all laid out so the staging gave each character his own weight instead of one swallowing the other.
One floor note from the shoot gets at how reaction work actually fails. A performer taking a strike from Rajinikanth was nervous enough that the reaction was not coming through, and D’Souza corrected the performer rather than the strike — after which Rajinikanth asked whether his own work was right. D’Souza also says the actor stayed on set through preparations, including the pyrotechnic set-ups, and put forward ideas of his own.
Learn more on IMDb: Jailer 2 (2026) · Chethan D’Souza
