EXCLUSIVE: While the world is currently in thrall to S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR, South Indian star Rana Daggubati was part of the first wave of Telugu cinema to sweep the globe – starring in Rajamouli’s Baahubali: It’s the Beginning Baahubali 2 – The ConclusionHe played Bhallaladeva, the villain, in this film.
Daggubati was at the International Film Festival of India in Goa. Deadline His upcoming Netflix series will discuss the international expansion of Hyderabad’s Telugu-language movie industry. Rana NaiduHere are some changes to the Indian economy over the last few years.
First off, Daggubati says that, while it’s exciting that global audiences are embracing Telugu movies, they’ve always had a huge audience among Telugu-speaking Indians living overseas. Here in India, there’s more excitement around the fact that Indians who don’t speak Telugu have also started to watch these films.
“Baahubali was not just the first Telugu film that the West watched, it was also one of the first Telugu films that India watched within ourselves,” Daggubati says. “That was the first time it was accepted that cinema from all different parts of India can land across the country and do a good job.”
There are many other options “pan-Indian” blockbusters in different Indian languages have been released since then – RRRIt is the K.G.F. Franchising KantaraDaggubati states that it is. “created an Indian moment” Immediately, he began to transform the distribution and release of local film.
“Whereas you speak one language and have one center in Los Angeles, here in India we have several industries in different cities with ecosystems of their own,” He goes on. “We are all different, creatively, business-wise and in the culture that we were coming from. So this is the first time that we’ve started making stories for the whole of India. In the next couple of years, there’ll be a lot more of these movies that you’ll hear about.
Daggubati is unusual in that he’s one of the few Indian stars who already works across all these industries – he’s also starred in Hindi-language (a.k.a. Bollywood films like Dum Maaro Dum Tamil Film Bangalore Naatkal. He’s also a producer through his family’s firm Suresh Productions, a VFX producer through his Bangalore-based Spirit Media and runs a business accelerator programme for technology startups Anthill Studio.
He predicts that the kind of crossover he’s been involved in will become commonplace in India. “It’s already started in some ways – you see enough companies from the Hindi industry that are producing South Indian content, and seeing producers from the south making Hindi movies. It’s just that it’s becoming easier now because the distribution mechanisms are starting to fall in place.
Daggubati’s upcoming Netflix show, Rana NaiduThe Hindi version of the U.S. crime series, titled?, was adapted by? in Hindi Ray DonovanSunder Aron produced this film under Locomotive Global. Daggubati is the Ray Donovan role, and he plays a fixer, who cleans up the mess for Bollywood stars. This film marks his first screen time sharing the screen with Venkatesh Daggubati. Karan AnshumanInside Edge, MirzapurSuparn verma is his co-director.
“This is definitely a format that I want to understand and be a part of,” says Daggubati, who previously took part in Banijay Asia’s reality show Mission Frontline. “What’s happened in the last couple of years, with the way cinema and audiences are changing, is that there’s no longer this pressure that to have a successful career you have to do two or three films a year. That’s what I learned on Baahubali – we spent six years making one film, but it changed the course of history. Now you don’t know what you’re doing next but something really new is going to come along.”
While the streamers have started making content in Indian languages other than Hindi, the OTT revolution hasn’t hit the South Indian content industries to quite the same extent it has in Mumbai, the home of Bollywood. The majority of South Indian stars, filmmakers and writers still focus on filmmaking. Things are changing.
“India as a country never had premium television – we made very long soaps and big-ticket films – so we had these two skillsets,” Daggubati explains. “We’re still growing in the department of writing and literature in that sense of long-form premium content. It’s a very different format to cinema, especially in the way that actors and the audience engage.”
So has Mumbai had a head start in producing series and streaming content? “It’s just that all the global heads of these streamers land up there,” He smiles. “So the teaching happens there first, then slowly starts to devolve.”
He also said that South India is home to some great writers. So, keep an eye out for this. “They’re more localized, because many of the writers and filmmakers in Mumbai have lived there for a long time, but in the South there’s a lot more diversity. The cream of the filmmaking community is from smaller towns and they have more of a connection with the audience locally.”