This story about the movie “RRR” originally appeared in the Race Begins issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
Indian film “RRR” was in the United States for six months and had two separate releases at the end of September, and had already grossed more than $140 million worldwide. So, in a way, the film didn’t have much to prove when it arrived at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theater on September 30 as part of Beyond Fest, except that the screening came 10 days after the committee designated India’s entry into the Oscars. The Best International Feature Film category opted not to present director SS Rajamouli’s three-hour epic, a snub that made the Chinese Theater screening the de facto launch of a Best Picture campaign for the global hit.
Memo to Indian Committee: You blew it.
For three hours at the Chinese, a packed house in the 900-seat IMAX theater whooped, cheered and danced in the aisles as “RRR” put together its wildly over-the-top combination of extreme action, goofy humor and jaw-dropping dancing. sequences and some things that might even get you excited. Set in the 1920s and based on a pair of Indian freedom fighters fighting against British colonial rule, the film was such a thrill ride that TheWrap reviews editor Alonso Duralde tweeted: “Well that skips to my Top 5 Movie Experiences of All Time.” .”
“In my part of India, my movies are screened that way,” said Rajamouli, India’s highest-paid director and a mainstay of the “Tollywood” system that produces movies in the Telugu language common in parts of southeast India. . “But to see that (in the Chinese) was amazing, since most of them were Americans there. I didn’t expect that at all.”
Rajamouli’s last two films “Baahubali: The Beginning” and “Baahubali 2: The Conclusion” were also global hits and like “RRR” were the most expensive films ever made in India at the time. And while the director, who collaborated with his late father on many of his screenplays, including “RRR,” said he “always wants to be bigger and better than previous movies,” the new one faced the formidable challenge of COVID. -19. a particularly difficult hurdle for a big-budget movie with a cast in the thousands and plenty of huge crowd scenes. “We lost about a year and a half,” he said. “Everything was shut down for a period of nine months, a total shutdown. We could do a little bit of work in post-production, but COVID protocols were different for different countries, so we had trouble bringing in foreign casts and actors. And then, right before the release, we had to push the movie back for another two and a half months.”
The movie turned out to be a three-year project, but it would have been a marathon even without COVID: It took 320 days of shooting, including more than 40 night shoots for a single jaw-dropping battle scene in which a truck full of wild animals (all generated by computer) crashes into a huge but elegant British party. “Getting so many people dressed, getting them on set, keeping them in their places is hard work,” he said. “And then the income from the animals generated by computer. Everyone has to react to these animals, which are not present at the time of shooting. All people have to imagine that particular animal running in a particular way and doing a particular action, and they have to react to that. It was very, very crazy.”
And now that “RRR” is gaining attention in the United States, does Rajamouli have any aspirations of moving from Tollywood to Hollywood? “I would be lying if I said no, because every filmmaker and every storyteller wants their story to be seen or heard by more and more audiences,” he said. “And also, I would like to learn how they work. But at the same time, I have a style that I would like to maintain. I would like to tell my kind of stories in my own way. So I’m trying to see how both can come together. Yes, there is a lot of interest from people in Hollywood, but at this point I’m still trying to see how our interests can coexist or align. It should be a win-win situation.”
Read more of the Race Begins issue here.
