That however simplistically it might sound, was technically the first lesson I learnt in terms of the complex practicalities of the shooting of a film on location. The difference between how much would you be compromising versus how stuck you are about what you imagined has a very thin line. In the case of the college name-board after Nageshwar Rao’s input I spoke to the art director Tarani to adjust the board height to the exact desired height.

Siva Nageshwar Rao was technically my assistant but I started off my career as being his assistant in the making of “Rao Gari Illu”, the director of which was Tarani. Nageshwar Rao never trusted me enough to give me a responsible job because I was the producer’s recommendation candidate. But in the course of filming he kind of warmed up to me as he might have felt that I am a little more than just the producer’s recommended candidate. So when I got the break for “SHIVA” I requested Nageshwar Rao to assist me.

So my assistants were Siva Nageshwar Rao, Krishna Vamsi, Teja and Uttej. Teja, I met him as a camera assistant of Maheedhar the cameraman of “Rao Gari Illu”. Both Krishna Vamsi and Uttej were kind of recommended by Nageshwar Rao.

From the time I was trying to get a break till I reached “Rao Gari Illu” I was able to impress the producers Venkat and Surendra so much that they were giving me, an assistant, more importance than the director himself which obviously was not taken too kindly by the rest of the assistants of that film let alone the director. They used to think that I am just conning the producers with my English and high funda talk which was partly true but what was also true is that my high funda talk had enough material in it to convince the producers to give me a break.

It was very rare during those days that you could be an assistant who can talk English and that used to intimidate them. What also used to intimidate them was my knowledge of English films and also filmmaking techniques which I picked up by voraciously reading “American Cinematographer” magazines which used to lie around in Annapurna Studio’s store room and read by nobody but me.

Coming back to Siva Nageshwar Rao, after all the confidence and my supposed knowledge with which I convinced the producers and Nagarjuna by the time we reached the production stage, on the first day of the shoot I didn’t know how to call for the shot. I just became blank with so many people on the set and so many things happening and Siva Nageshwar Rao from behind was whispering in my ear to call for “start, camera” and to say “sound” and then “action”. So my first day shoot went on by mostly being prompted by Siva Nageshwar Rao.

The cameraman Gopal Reddy after finishing lighting shouted “Order, Sir”, which I took as he wants order on the set and I also repeated after him by shouting “Order, Sir”. Across the set Siva Nageshwar Rao gave a dirty look at me, took me aside and said, “He is asking you to order him to take that shot and that’s why he is saying ‘Order, Sir’ and since you are the ‘Sir’ here, how can you yourself again shout ‘Order, Sir’”. Sheepishly nodding I followed Siva Nageshwar Rao’s instructions.

And this is what I call as being an assistant to an assistant to an assistant.

P.S: Later on I produced “Money” with Siva Nageshwar Rao as director.

2. The Phoonk 2 contest is nothing but a gimmick.
Ans: When did I say No?

3. Nobody can win that contest?
Ans: That’s the idea, my friend.

4. Nobody will be that stupid as to take part in that contest.
Ans: You will be surprised.

5. The Phoonk 2 contest is scientifically incorrect.
Ans: Can you and the other brainies just chill and not take everything so seriously and let stupidies like me and the guys who want to take part in the contest just have our fun.

6. This whole fucking life is nothing but a long dream.
Ans: Yeah but it irritatingly keeps waking us up all the time.

7. To realize that you do not understand is a virtue. Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.
Ans: And to realize that you understand is a default.

8. The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Ans: Yes, and then they are no longer called crazy.

9. My mind is obsessed with your blog thoughts.
Ans: Don’t forget that my thoughts are what I gathered over the years from many others thoughts. So it might not be that bad to get obsessed after all.

10. What is your take on editing?
Ans: It is nothing but about deciding what to show when.

11. In my childhood I asked my school teacher why a table fan rotates clockwise and a ceiling fan anti-clockwise.
Ans: If it is true that’s a pretty keen observation and I hope you are using your ability to observe beyond fans.

12. I think you should start a psychology clinic.
Ans: That’s a damn neat idea. I think I will have enough patients from this blog itself.

13. Don’t you think revealing too much info on Rakta Charitra will kill the excitement?
Ans: I don’t think I will be ever able to reveal enough of Rakta Charitra even in the film by itself because the subject matter is too deep and one can keep on excavating it without ever reaching the bottom.

14. If you find Ramayana boring material for a film then how could you have liked Avatar?
Ans: I already mentioned in my article that I never saw Avatar as a film. I just merely experienced it.

15. Why the hell do you want to make a film on the scum of society?
Ans: So that nerds like you will understand how that scum gets created.

16. When you think of mountain heights, I think of dynamites and tunnels. – Gail Wynand “Fountainhead”.
Ans: When you think of Mother Teresa, I think of Hitler and Osama Bin Laden. – RGV-“blog”.

17. Don’t justify criminals in Rakta Charitra.
Ans: Well Sir, if you just ignore a criminal by merely calling him a criminal, you can be sure that the criminal will not ignore you.

18. You said that a director should not feel an emotion as he will be in the danger of loosing his objectivity and then you say you travelled emotionally along with the characters of Rakta Charitra.
Ans: I meant as in a travel of studying their emotions.

19. A man’s essential nature is goodness.
Ans: Yes but the problem is that the bad men don’t know it, and hence they continue to be bad. So a good man like you should go and tell the bad men that they are actually good men so that they then can feel good about being bad men.

20. Why did you buckle under pressure and showed Sarkar to Bal Thackeray?
Ans: Dumbo, he never asked me to show. It was me who was dying to show off.

21. You are a very shallow person.
Ans: Yes, and that’s the reason I stay afloat.

22. To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity. – Nietzsche.
Ans: Not to stick to just one purpose is uncommon intelligence.  – RGV

To truly understand a character actually means that you should have lived the life of that person in one way or the other and the fact that the particular person lived such an extreme life means that you also will get such extreme understanding. Satyendra once told me that if you truly seriously read a book, just in a few hours you can get all the knowledge of that author what it probably took that author a lifetime to gather and understand to put it in a certain perspective.

Rakta Charitra is not really about a realistic portrayal of the faction violence of Anantpur. It’s more about a realistic understanding of the extremely turbulent emotional mindsets of certain individuals trapped in certain situations.

When some people asked me how the Rakta Charitra story which happened in Andhra Pradesh could be identifiable to a Hindi audience as they would not be knowing of Ravi or Anantpur, my answer was that a film works on identification with emotions and never on an identification with a background. For example when I read or saw Godfather I had never heard of even the word Mafia or Italian families before that, but I simply connected to the character conflicts in the story.

So a Godfather story can happen anywhere whether it is New York or Mumbai or a village in Tamil Nadu. So likewise I am creating a world in Rakta Charitra based, inspired and interpreted from those true life characters and those true life incidents.

So for me to try and understand and interpret the characters of Ravi, Suri, Obul Reddy, Moddusreenu to name just a few of the plethora of characters from Rakta Charitra and then as an exercise to see the same story from the point of view of each of those characters so as to arrive at a reasonably close realization of what could be the truth and also to arrive at the actual reasons behind some of those unbelievably terrible decisions they took was the greatest and the most enriching process that I have gone through in the process of researching Rakta Charitra. But now that those thought processes turned into flesh and blood, and I can see the characters and hear them on film puts in a new meaning to my own understanding because they now from a perception have become a reality albeit only on film.

When people ask me how real Rakta Charitra is going to be, I said ‘It will be as real as what I think is real”. This I say because it’s impossible for anyone to be factually and absolutely correct in the context of such a story for the simple reason that I was not present there when those terrible incidents were planned and made to happen but the fact that I was privy to all the various versions of the participants, the eye witnesses and also the accounts of investigative officers by playing half a detective and half a journalist to get to the core of the truth, I would say that what I am filming is the truth or atleast truth as perceived by me.

But the irony is that the truth as I perceived it is seeming truthful even to the people who were directly involved in the actual happenings. That’s because each of those individuals were only privy to their own individual reading of the incidents and motivations whereas I tried to show them what actually happened mixed with even their opponents motivations.

When I showed some finished scenes of Rakta Charitra to a certain involved individual whose name I cannot take for obvious reasons, he had tears in his eyes as he understood the compulsions of his opposing individuals behind a certain act that happened a long time ago which he would not otherwise ever have bothered to think about at the time period it happened.

When Obul Reddy was hacked to death in Maheshwari Towers in Hyderabad by a group of men who came clad in burkhas I remember it sending shockwaves of fear throughout the city.

As an incident it is chilling to hear but the moment, in the course of my research, I got into the mindset of Obul Reddy and into the mindset of the man who planned it and also into the mindset of the man who actually physically hacked him, the incident now to me is from a completely different perspective because now I am watching a culmination of 3 individuals thought and emotional processes and because of that a truly unique understanding happened to me which resulted in me having lived and learned from and also about such unimaginably extreme people.

At the end of the day every one of us at any given point of any moment in our lives are the sum result of what we read, who we meet and what we experience because all three would amount to new inputs in us thereby adding to our overall understanding of life, so it follows that our learning, our intelligence and our analytical power depends completely upon what situations we will dare to put ourselves into and on, what kind of people we will take efforts to meet and interact with.

The story of Rakta Charitra the way it happened, the way I understood its various people as in how they themselves understood it and then the way I myself understood it and analyzed it surely made me learn a hell of a lot about the blood life and the blood people in general and about some very very extreme blood people in particular. And I call this my BLOOD LEARNING.

Ans: That could be because I think in English and also the influence on me has been mainly from English authors and English films.

2. Inspite of your literary and philosophical knowledge my assumption is that you must have been an average student.

Ans: I was actually a very bad student as I failed twice in my engineering and I finally passed with bare minimum marks and that also by copying.

3. The intensity of desire and passion determines the amount of pain we can sustain,

Ans: If the pain is physical it cannot be in control of the mind but a mental or an emotional pain will always be in the realm and the control of our own mind and it only depends on our understanding power. I always feel passion and never pain. In other words I am too understanding to ever feel pain.

4. If someone tries to get into medicine or engineering and misses the admission by a whisker will you consider him/her a failure?

Ans: For me anyone wanting to become an engineer or doctor is a failure. I know I must be sounding juvenile and stupid but since I experienced engineering I hate it and definitely I don’t want to spend my life looking into other peoples injuries and illnesses but yes I am glad that there are plenty out there who are stupid enough not to think like me and become doctors so that they are there to take care of me when I get sick or injured.

5. “Wages of fear” are the kind of work places in films where you need to go next.

Ans: I really agree with you and I am truly amazed at the insights you have on cinema. It’s not about praising or criticizing but it’s the why I am interested in as only asking why, telling why and listening to why, is what can make any one really grow.

6. Many hate you for the same reasons that others love you.

Ans: Story of my life Sir. On the same thought I want to say this, that if everyone unanimously hated a certain piece of my work I can probably seriously come to a conclusion that it is bad but even if one in thousands likes it and also for the reasons I intended then it can confuse me for the rest of my life. So since I can’t live in confusion I continue to do my work the way I chose to and hope that the one will some day become many. But many times the many become one and since I don’t know when that will happen I have no choice but to consider one as many.

7. There are a million possible films inside and outside each actual film.

Ans: I don’t know how to address you. (I don’t like your blog id cinephilia) but I must say that this is one of the most insightful understanding of cinema I ever heard among many others you said on this blog periodically. There is a very good writer or a director hidden in you and I would like to meet you to discuss the possibility of us working together.

8. A woman is like a highway. More the curves more the dangers.

Ans: Yes but I would rather risk the danger than loose out on the travel.

9. Personally I want sex, action, shock, free wheeling camera and celebration kind of movies from you.

Ans: Ahhhhhh! You are tempting me now. Yes, I think it’s high time I start doing that.

10. The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticisms.

Ans: Both praise and criticism have no meaning unless accompanied by reasons acceptable to the subject.

11. Contract is a movie that did not work for me. It might be a good exercise for interested people to improve or rework it.

Ans: Superb. Michael Caine once said that people should not remake hits and only flops should be remade. If there is a germ in the original idea like any idea is bound to have one can try and rework it.

12. Why is your art always serious and why not comedy art? Isn’t that the original Ramu?

Ans: Kind of yes. But the problem is that I look at comedy seriously and at seriousness comically.

13. How did you create Mallik’s character?

Ans: A bit of Howard Roark and a bit of me and lots of bits of what I copied from characters from various films I have seen over the years.

14. How do I discover my passion?

Ans: By just being truly truthful to your feelings.

15. Do the people who work for you also ask you questions like we do on this blog?

Ans: No, but I think it’s mostly the people who work with me who give me gaali’s on this blog with changed names.

16. Ayn Rand said, “Many people don’t like to find answers. They just like to think that no answer is possible”.

Ans: Yes and also most people just want to live their lives commenting on others faults and also gloating in others failures thereby completely and totally resigning themselves to be the ultimate failures in life.

P.S: I am posting a new trailor of Phoonk 2 and also the details of a Contest.

Youtube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LEt6aET8o8

PHOONK 2 – Scare Contest

Before the release of “PHOONK” there was a contest put out that if any viewer could dare to see the film sitting all alone in a theatre and not run out scared he will get a Cash Prize of Rs.5,00,000/- (USD$10,000/-).

The contestant who took the challenge didn’t even last for 30mins and ran out of the theatre.

After the release, some people alleged that the contest was rigged and that they never felt fear while watching the film. So now without going into an argument on the same, we have decided to open ourselves to a scientific evaluation of that claim.

For “PHOONK 2” we are going to implement our Contest in a very scientific way as never ever done before in the history of Cinema anywhere across the World. The viewer who will claim that he is not going to get scared will be fitted with an ECG machine while he is watching Phoonk 2 which will monitor his Heartbeat and Pulse rate and this will be shown live on a screen outside the theatre to both the Media and all concerned.

A normal person according to professionals has a certain average heartbeat and when subjected to any kind of an intense emotion the beats will considerably go up. So if the challenger claims that he had no fear while watching PHOONK 2 the monitor will tell whether he is lying or not and on the other hand if he can control his fear and thereby his heartbeat and not let it cross his normal heartbeat then he will get to win the cash prize of Rs.5Lakhs (USD$10,000/-).

We intend to launch the contest on 10th March on our official website www.phoonk2.in. This contest is Restricted to only healthy people with no history of Cardiac disease and also only to people who are between 18 and 60 years of age.

The contest will be open for people across INDIA and based on a computerized random draw people will be shortlisted, who then further will have to give a medical indemnification for further selection by our team and a medical professional who will eventually single out the final Challenger to be subjected to the test. The Challengers normal heartbeat will be recorded before and while the screening is happening. We will also make sure that the contestant is actually watching the film without closing his eyes by shooting him Live through a night vision camera and showing his facial expressions to the media and all concerned on a screen outside the theatre. If at all he wins this challenge he will be awarded the Prize money right at the Venue in front of everybody.

Official Website
http://www.Phoonk2.in

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2. I don’t build so that I can hire clients. I want clients so that I can build.
Ans: I built my entire life on the above line of Howard Roark from “Fountainhead”.

3. Is lust the feeling of an idle mind?
Ans: On the contrary it’s the feeling of an active mind. A laidback person will be the worst in bed.

4. The real purpose of art is not to please or make the audience comfortable. It is about rebelling.
Ans: Brilliantly put, Vamsee.

5. Do you think your visions have been programmed by movies like Godfather?
Ans: I would say that they added.

6. Style without content is when frames start irritating like in case of “Sarkar Raj”.
Ans: My purpose is to either irritate you or to awe you or to inspire you or atleast to make you take your valuable time off to post your comment here. Ha Ha! Mission accomplished.

7. Film is a dramatized reality and it is the director’s job to make it appear real. The audience should never become conscious of technique. – David Lean.
Ans: Film is a fantasized reality and it’s the director’s job to make real look like fantasy. The audience should be super conscious of the technique and that is the one and only reason why I am still being allowed to make films. – RGV

8. In the clip you posted, is the last shot of the kid waving inspired from Gandhi?
Ans: Yes and I would say it was copied.

9. Why do many on this blog try to impress you?
Ans: For the same reason I try to impress them.

10. I dream for a living. – Steven Spielberg
Ans: I live to dream. – RGV

11. Do you have any psychological deficiencies?
Ans: I only have psychological deficiencies and I manage to con people into thinking that they are my efficiencies.

12. I want to discuss philosophy with you when we are drunk.
Ans: I drink because I philosophize and don’t philosophize when I am drunk.

13. Please give credit to Suman for giving you the title “Department” in the titles.
Ans: I am.

14. You have precision, speed and economy in your filming techniques.
Ans: I am really touched with your observations.

15. Do you think shyness/introvert has a relation with low self esteem?
Ans: Shyness is function of fear of rejection and insecurity but an introvert could also be because of extreme arrogance.

16. You say that people should not swim with the tide and then you say that they should not be guarding their beliefs and just let them mingle with others beliefs. Contradictory?
Ans: The difference is in, whether you want to be programmed and just flow with the tide or with the help of others would you want to manipulate the tides.

17. Can you interpret “Fountainhead” for us on the blog?
Ans: What do you think I was doing all this time except for interpreting all those who have influenced me?

18. Before “Requiem for a Dream” Darren Aronofsky used the body rig in “Pi”.
Ans: Oh! I didn’t know that. Thanks.

19. You said “When you truly realize that you can never really truly own anything, you will not be desperate to guard it”. You have been hurt a lot, haven’t you?
Ans: Arisha, the day you stop thinking for me and think for yourself there’s a higher chance of you getting to know me.

20. Your films are on an abstract level because you have evolved on a abstract level. I have been noticing this since “Company”.
Ans: You have a point there. But I think I am reversing in “Rakta Charitra”.

21. You are like a porn actress who gets naked in her website but goes covered in society.
Ans: Ha Ha. That’s truly a brilliant analogy. My whole office could not stop laughing with this comment of yours as they too feel the same.

22. Just saw “Rann”… liked most of it, although it could have better edited.
Ans: Ok Sir.

23. Your website is as good as a porn site.
Ans: I think you are visiting the wrong porn sites. There are far better ones.

24. You know how to twist things. Your tactical maneuverability sometimes works but failure is as hard as success.
Ans : Yes, and success is as brittle as failure.

25. I get fever thinking of how much work you do.
Ans: And I don’t ever get fever because of much work I do.

26. Why do people have so much greed for money?
Ans: The irony is that people with loads of money don’t know how to spend it and people with no money can’t stop thinking about how to spend it.

27. Frankly speaking Ayn Rand is not interesting but you made her interesting in the way your mind has interpreted her philosophy.
Ans: That’s pretty much true for all interpretations. I might have learnt from Ayn Rand and you might learn Ayn rand through me but the sum effect is what you learn for yourself and then neither me nor Ayn Rand will matter.
28. How did you become so philosophical from being a careless guy?
Ans: I became careless only after philosophizing because I realized through it that caring is what which creates expectations and consequently disappointments.

29. Happy Shiva Raathri.
Ans: All my Raathri’s are Shiva Raathri’s and they are happy and so there can’t be any specifically happy Shiva Rathri for me.

30. How come many directors try to shoot women the way you do but fail?
Ans: That’s because they like the way I look at women but they don’t love women the way I do.

31. Is your “Ramuism” a sum of no isms?
Ans: Yes, it’s a sum of no isms and all isms.

32. Do you feel hurt or angry when people make negative and insulting comments on you?
Ans: In answer to this I would like to quote a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”.

In whichever context he said and to whoever he addressed the basic point is that each and every one of us comes alone into the world and we have to fend for ourselves alone. But the design of nature is such that whole of our lives we are made to both value and devalue ourselves through others valuation. I understood this truth very early on and I decided to live and die by my own values.