Baahubali makers wanted to cast Sanjay Dutt for Kattappa but couldn’t because ‘he was still in jail’

Prasad also shared how he came up with the story for Baahubali and Rajamouli’s first vision of the film. He shared, “My son (SS Rajamouli) told me he wanted to make a movie with Prabhas. He said it should be a costume drama and that he should be able to picturise good action scenes. He also said he wanted the female characters to be very powerful, equal to the male characters. And include some grey characters too.”

Sharing that the first character that he wrote for the 2015 film was that of Kattappa’s. “The next morning, I narrated a small introduction to the character of Kattappa.

“I didn’t have a story with me, I just told him (Rajamouli) about a foreigner who comes to India and sees an old person teaching swordsmanship to young students. Impressed, the foreigner claims the old man to be the best swordsman in the region. The old man refutes his claim by telling him about Baahubali. He tells him that nobody was able to injure Baahubali as long as he had a sword. He fought against 200 people and killed them all. By evening, he would be soaked in blood, but not a drop was his. When the foreigner said he wanted to meet Baahubali, the old man said he was dead. The foreigner didn’t understand how that was possible. Then the old man said backstabbing is a more powerful weapon and told the foreigner that it was he who back-stabbed Baahubali. The other scene I narrated was of a mother carrying a child, wading across a river, which eventually became the powerful opening scene of the franchise. He told me to put it all together and weave a story. We took around four-five months to develop the script,” Prasad revealed.

Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) followed by Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017), starring Prabhas, Sathyaraj, Rana Daggubati, Anushka Shetty, Tamannaah Bhatia, Ramya Krishna and Nassar were among the most successful Telugu film in the history of films in India which gave birth to the term pan-India films.