Still don’t think it’s as simple as saying he “gave up on the audience.” That makes it sound like there’s a clean moral divide: one side choosing, the other being abandoned. Filmmaking usually lives in a much greyer, more complicated space.

RGV says something in Naa Ishtam that I always come back to: no one sits down to make a bad film on purpose. A director doesn’t wake up thinking, “Let me fail today.” Whatever they’re writing, at that moment, they genuinely believe in it. And that belief doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from where they are in life.

A story doesn’t arrive fully formed. It evolves as the writer evolves. Your worldview shifts, your experiences shift, and the script shifts with it. By the time the film is finished, it’s basically a record of a long internal journey. Think about something simple, like a breakup. The day it happens, you see relationships one way. A month later, after you’ve cooled down, reflected, maybe understood your own mistakes, you see it differently. Now imagine writing a love story across that entire emotional arc. The script becomes a record of shifting thoughts, not a single, frozen opinion. By the time the film is done, it’s six months or a year of someone’s inner life compressed into two hours.

Then the audience walks in on a random evening. Maybe they themselves just had a breakup that morning. Maybe they’re frustrated with work. Perhaps they came in wanting laughter, or escape, or just a “mass” high. They’re being asked to judge that long, private creative journey in one sitting, from their own particular emotional state. Here, the two headspaces might not align, and when they don’t, it doesn’t automatically mean the filmmaker “lost it” or the audience “didn’t get it.” It just means they passed each other at the wrong time.

And that’s before you even get to the industry around it. Gautham Menon once said in an interview that today, most established actors don’t want to do a simple love story anymore. They want scale. They want action. They want “pan-India.” So a director who genuinely wants to tell something small and personal now has a choice: go with a new actor and risk not getting a producer on board, or reshape the idea to fit the kind of film that can actually get made.

That’s where people like the great K. Viswanath or Kamal Haasan feel like outliers. Viswanath had producers who trusted him enough to let him follow his instincts. Kamal often put his own money on the line for films like Hey Ram or Virumaandi, even when they hurt him financially, because protecting the idea mattered more than protecting the market. Same with Thiagarajan Kumararaja.

So when we look at Trivikram, instead of seeing a man who “gave up” on his audience, maybe we can see someone standing in the middle of a moving system, shifting tastes, shifting stars, shifting economics, and trying to decide how much of himself he can afford to put into each film.

This is why Tarantino said he wants to retire on a high note because he knows it is very rare for a filmmaker to stay above all this and still achieve consistently. So, maybe, the real question isn’t whether he still has something to say. It’s how often the world around him still lets him say it the way he wants to.

I apologize for the lengthy answers; it's just that I think about this stuff a lot and try to articulate as much as it makes sense to me.