Vetrimaaran On 'Bad Girl' Backlash, 37 Censor Cuts For 'Manushi': Today, Everybody Is Hypersensitive

The noise around Varsha Bharath's Bad Girl began before anyone had seen it. In an exclusive conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India, the film's producer and presenter, acclaimed Tamil filmmaker Vetrimaaran, opened up about the turbulence surrounding his recent films and the larger anxieties facing storytellers today.

“In today’s social media-empowered world, you can just set a narrative,” Vetrimaaran said. “A group of people can decide how something should be understood, and once that narrative is set, everyone ends up buying into it.” Backed by Vetrimaaran's Grass Root Film Company, Bad Girl narrates the coming-of-age story of Ramya, a teenage Brahmin girl navigating love and lust in Chennai. The film's teaser had received backlash from a section of the audience, who claimed that it depicts a particular community in a poor light.

According to Vetri, the examining committee of the CBFC initially refused certification to the film, a decision he attributes to “the kind of external pressure that was there.” But the revising committee eventually cleared the film with a UA 16+ certificate, asking only for “a few regular cuss words” to be muted.

For him, the difference is perspective: “When you are able to watch a film as a film, then it’s different. But if you start watching it by asking, ‘Who directed this? What’s their background? What’s their ideology?’—then that is a problem.”

His other production, Manushi, which began in 2023, faced a different struggle. “We started in 2023, and since then we’ve had a lot of challenges,” he recalls. “The censor committee rejected it. Then the revising committee rejected it. When we went asking for reasons for the rejection, they gave 37 cuts. And then we went to the courts again. Very soon, we’ll know what’s going to happen.”

For Vetrimaaran, though, the real problem goes beyond bureaucracy. “What’s happening is, in today’s world, everybody is scared of saying things. The biggest danger we all face is self-censorship. We don’t want to say certain things — not just because of the censors — but because the things that we could say very easily 10 years ago is something that you could never even dream of telling today. Even in a personal conversation, everybody is very touchy. We are becoming a very intolerant group of people.”

Despite these battles, he says he feels no exhaustion. “All these things are only making us excited to do more," he laughs. A censor board member once explained to him why his own directorials tend to avoid deeper trouble: “They said, ‘You are showing both good and bad on both sides. In Viduthalai, as an audience, if I choose to align with the chief secretary, I can. If I choose to align with Perumal, I can. That balance is missing in most of the films today.’ Maybe because of that, I don’t get into trouble.”

For Vetrimaaran, that balance is essential. “If Bad Girl is watched as a film for what it stands and what it speaks, and that offends you, then we can talk. But if you have a problem just because of who made it—that’s a problem.”