SS Rajamouli, “I told my father I want to become a director just to escape from him, but he took it seriously”

It won’t be overstatement to say that SS Rajamouli is one of the most accomplished filmmakers from India. After consistently helming larger-than-life entertainers, his last film RRR is making India proud, what after its nominations in the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes and other international acclaim.

But there was a time when Rajamouli was clueless on what he would like to do with life. In a video interview given to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where six of his films would be screened this year, he said that he once dropped out of college and was doing nothing. Obviously, his father, the iconic screenwriter KV Vijayendra Prasad, was worried for him and used to ask him what he would like to do in the future.

“(He said) it doesn’t matter what you want to be. You have to work for it. You can’t sit idle and waste your time,” said Rajamouli. “Just to escape from my father, I said I want to become a (film) director. I had no intention.”

The filmmaker said that he had no understanding of what one needs to be to become a director at that point of time. “But my father took it seriously,” Rajamouli added. “He sent me to work in different fields of the industry. I worked as an assistant to an editor, recording assistant, assistant director.”

At some point of time, K Vijayendra Prasad realized that his son has an understanding of dramatic sequences. “He used to tell us stories he was developing and I used to point out how the drama can be amplified or the problem in the story that is decreasing the drama. So, he hired me as his assistant,” said Rajamouli.

He added, “My job in the assistant department was to create the action sequences, even at that time. So, we would narrate the action sequences to the directors and some of them really liked them.”

It was the final result of those action sequences that gave a major push to Rajamouli to become a filmmaker.

“When I used to see the sequences on the screen, I used to be very, very disappointed,” he said. “That was not how I had envisioned them. So, these multiple disappointments at some point of time made me realize that I have to become a director to bring in the images in my mind to the screen exactly the way I want to.”

Also Read: Academy winner Jessica Chastain praises SS Rajamouli’s RRR: ‘Watching this movie was such a party’

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