Karunakaran & Ramesh Thilak Movies Together List — 10 Films

The shape of the work

The 2010s belonged to Soodhu Kavvum; the 2020s to Yaanai Mugathaan. Karunakaran acted in every film; Ramesh Thilak acted in all of them. Strictly Tamil cinema — they never crossed industries together.

Partnership facts

• Karunakaran and Ramesh Thilak first met on the sets of a short film in 2013. Karunakaran was the assistant director; Ramesh was an extra. They bonded over their shared frustration with the director's pace and decided to make their own film. That became Mahabalipuram (2015).
• On Oru Naal Koothu (2016), Karunakaran would write dialogues in the morning, and Ramesh Thilak would rewrite them in his head during lunch. They'd then shoot both versions — Karunakaran's tight script and Ramesh's looser improv — and pick the better one in the edit. The film's most quoted line ('Enna da nadakku') came from Ramesh's lunch-break version.
• Dharma Prabhu (2019) was the first Tamil film to use a single-take flashback sequence that ran 12 minutes. That technique was directly inspired by a drunken bet between Karunakaran and Ramesh Thilak during Oru Naal Koothu's post-production — Ramesh dared Karunakaran to shoot an entire scene without cuts. Karunakaran took the dare three years later.
• They have a standing rule: no phone calls after 10 PM. During Mahabalipuram's shoot, they once argued for four hours about a single line of dialogue, starting at 11 PM. The next morning, neither remembered the argument, but both had lost sleep. So they banned late-night work talk. They've kept it for all three films.
• Ramesh Thilak once said in a 2020 podcast: 'Karunakaran is the only director who lets me fail on camera. He knows I'll find the joke in the failure. That's why we made three films — he trusted my bad takes as much as my good ones.'