India — Chethan D’Souza Spent 11 Years in IT Before a YouTube Stunt Video Made Him an Action Director
- Chethan D’Souza spent about 11 years working in IT before action direction became his job.
- A stunt video he put on YouTube passed a million views and brought him his first film.
- He says every move is built around the actor’s age and physical limits.
Posted: October 31, 2026
The route in was not the usual one. Chethan D’Souza took a karate black belt starting in Class 8 and kept adding to it — parkour, gymnastics, calisthenics — while holding down about eleven and a half years at a multinational IT firm in Bengaluru. What moved him across was a stunt video he cut and put on YouTube. It passed a million views, director Pawan Kumar saw it, and “U-Turn” became his first film. Anyone who has tried to get a coordinator to look at a reel will recognise the shape of that: the work had to be visible before anyone would hire it.
His two most-seen credits sit at opposite ends of the register. On “Aavesham” he was in from the start, which let him design the fights to land inside the comedy rather than interrupt it — a timing problem as much as a choreography one. On “Jailer 2” the material is heavier: Suraj Venjaramoodu, as Dasamoolam Damu, lifting Moorthy and throwing him around, plus a run of stone-throwing beats. D’Souza singles Suraj out as remarkably precise in that work, which is the thing a coordinator actually needs from a comic actor handling weight — repeatable placement, take after take.
The part of the conversation that travels is how he builds for the body in front of him. “We carefully design every movement, taking into account an actor’s age and physical limitations,” he says, and the follow-on is schedule management: keeping a performer fresh enough across consecutive days that they don’t arrive at the next call already spent. Where the work goes past what the actor can carry, it goes to professionals — a jump from a helicopter is his example — and he is direct about why that is not a compromise: “This is their livelihood, too.” Modern finishing does the rest of the job of selling it as the lead.
He is also candid about the part of the craft nobody puts in a showreel. An elaborate fight can come out of the edit at thirty seconds to a minute, or disappear entirely, and he files that under the director’s creative call rather than a grievance. The job description, in his telling, is imagining people being punched, thrown and left bleeding for a living — while, he says, being unable to watch someone bleed in real life.
Next up is “Scene,” the Jithu Madhavan cop comedy with Suriya and Naslen as the villain, whose trailer landed the same day. On the Rajinikanth set he ran his instructions in Kannada over the mic; Rajinikanth heard it, told him he spoke good Kannada, and afterwards took to translating the Tamil banter between director Nelson, cinematographer Vijay and D’Souza back into it.
Learn more on IMDb: Jailer 2 (2026) · Aavesham (2024) · Scene (2026) · Chethan D’Souza
