Director Shankar denies allegations

A day after Ranveer Singh and director Shankar officially announced that they were teaming up for the Hindi adaptation of the 20105 blockbuster Tamil film, Anniyan (Aparichitudu in Telugu), the project has received a blow.

Aascar Ravichandran, the producer of the original movie, has reportedly written to director Shankar claiming that he still holds the remake rights of the psychological action thriller. As such, any such adoption or remaking or copying the main plot of the said movie, without his permission, is totally unlawful.

Calling the Hindi version of the film, ‘illegal’, Ravichandran, in the strongly-worded letter, asserted that Shankar could not adapt or remake Anniyan without his permission and warned that he would issue legal notices. Dubbing it as a ‘violation of copyright’ Ravichandran further appealed to stop work on the project.
When we reached out to the producer, Jayantilal, for his version of the matter, he declined to comment beyond saying that Ravichandran’s allegations were not against Pen Studios, but against director Shankar.

“We don’t want to comment anything on this at this point  now. We (Pen Studios) are not at all involved in this, and Ravichandran was referring to director Shankar and not us,” he stressed.

Shankar denies

Director Shankar, in an open letter to Ravichandran, denies allegations saying that everyone associated with the film (Anniyan) were aware that the script and storyline belongs exclusively to him and that the film was released with the tag: Story, Screenplay and Direction by Shankar.

He further added that he has not assigned in writing any script or screenplay to any person (referring to the film’s dialogue writer late Sri Sujatha), and that he continues to retain the right to exploit the script in any manner he deems fit. As the admitted author of the literary work, his rights cannot be interfered with under any circumstances.

“You as the producer have gained substantially from the success of the film Anniyan, and are needlessly trying to unjustly enrich yourself even in my future endeavours which have no correlation to you. Needless to state, I can only hope good sense will prevail upon you after this clarification and you will stop agitating such baseless claims. This reply is issued without prejudice, and to clarify the actual situation of me as a director and writer being subject to such avaricious and illegal claims to needlessly attempt to jeopardise my future projects,” wrote Shankar.