RGV Blog

In Vijaywada when I was doing my engineering there were so many times when I used to stand in the line waiting to buy a ticket for the new Sridevi movie and I used to keep staring in awe at her on the hoardings in the theater compound. Her beauty and her sex appeal were [...]

Just posting some memoirs of my assistant director Siva Nageshwar Rao of his experiences with me during the making of “Shiva”. These he mailed me after he read my “Assistant to Assistant” article on this blog. “You used to repeatedly tell the story of  ‘Shiva’ to all us assistants, not just scene by scene but [...]

I was so confidently clear about the opening shot of my first film “SHIVA” that the camera set on the crane should be showing the college in the suggestion of a college name-board, come down slowly and pan to the close-up of a car wheel coming into the foreground and stopping in front of the [...]

He was my junior at Siddhartha Engineering college in Vijayawada. The first time I remember seeing him was when he was coming towards our hostel on a scooter. Short and very unassuming looking I hardly took notice of him. Me and a few others together used to be a very tough gang on the campus [...]

If a man is about what he is and not what he was then I would say my birth was at Siddhartha Engineering College in Vijayawada. This is because if I take into consideration the kind of a person I am today, I can trace back every thought, every idea, every experience and every influence [...]

The year I had the idea of making “RAAT” a cousin of mine called Chitti had an idea of opening a bar & restaurant on Mehdi Patnam Road in Hyderabad. He reasoned that there was a huge colony on that road and not a single bar was there 5kms either way of the location he [...]

When I was hanging out around Annapurna Studios trying to get a break, I used to attend the music composing sessions of “Collector Gari Abbayi”. In the course of those sessions whenever its music director Chakravarti and the director B.Gopal used to go for lunch I used to chat up with the music director’s assistant and once in a while he used to sing tunes which he himself composed. I was very impressed with many of his tunes and one day I described to him a scene from “SHIVA” the way I was intending to shoot it and I asked him about what kind of music he thinks should be there in that scene and he replied that there should not be any music in that scene. I was mighty impressed with the answer especially as it came from a musician and I committed to him that if ever I get a break I will sign him as my music director.

There was an extreme excitement in all us youngsters at Panjagutta Colony in Hyderabad sometime in the early 70’s as somehow word got around that a new film called “Enter the Dragon” was coming starring a new actor called ‘Bruce Lee’. It was supposed to have some mind blowing martial arts sequences. I never heard [...]

There are people who do and people who don’t want to do but the majority of the people can’t decide what to do, is what I have realized over the years. I call them the inbetweenists because they are neither successful in their individual achievements nor are they failures who have atleast tried to become [...]

One day when I went to meet Mr.Bachchan in his office on a prior appointment he arrived a little late and told me that he got tied up in some work to do with a film called “Cheeni Kum”. I asked him what that film was about and he said that it is a love [...]