‘Actress waited 10 days, never shot, still charged Rs 1 crore’: RGV on Telugu industry crisis

He argued that the director should be the one bearing responsibility for cost overruns, but said that accountability is almost entirely absent from the Telugu system. “The most important thing is to hold the director accountable. We’re the ones coming up with the ideas, deciding how to spend the money. If the director isn’t held accountable, how will the business model work?” Ram Gopal Varma said. “Why does this happen? Because they lack accountability. Independent producers are always focused on managing the money flow. If the hero’s available on certain dates, they just agree and wait. Directors with that kind of mindset, who just say whatever you decide is fine, are impossible to control.”

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He cited a specific example, without naming the film, to make the point. “A particular film became a big hit. The director got paid based on the number of days he worked. He got his remuneration. Even if the film is a hit, the producer doesn’t make much money. Why? Because all of it went into the cost budget. Since the budget got bigger, the money went there,” he said.

Ram Gopal Varma then questioned whether the people funding Telugu films deserve to be called producers at all. “Why are we even calling them producers here? Basically, they aren’t producers, they’re just investors,” he said. “Movie production is an art, and unless you’re fully involved and know it inside out, it just won’t happen. These people are all investors, and honestly, they don’t know much. There’s no cost control, nothing like that.”

To illustrate just how casually money is treated in the industry, Ram Gopal Varma shared a story about a senior actress who was given a 10-day call sheet for a film. She showed up on set every morning, got her makeup done, and sat in her caravan waiting to be called. For five to six of those ten days, she was never called to shoot a single scene.

“It’s been like five or six days since I called her, but she still says she won’t do it and that she’ll return the advance,” Ram Gopal Varma recounted. “She got the full payment, though, and she felt guilty for taking payment without doing the work. They don’t mind at all, they’re still paying.” He estimated that the actress earned Rs 1 crore for those ten days.

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That kind of carelessness, he argued, is baked into the system once budgets cross a certain threshold. “When the budget goes from Rs 100 crores to 200 crores, nobody really cares about Rs 1-2 crore,” he said.

On why budgets keep inflating, Ram Gopal Varma said the problem is a culture of one-upmanship fuelled by past blockbusters. “They’ll say, that movie’s song was grand, let’s make a song even better than that. Or, KGF 2 came out with amazing action, let’s add something like that. Or, the background score in that film was awesome, let’s use something like that,” he said. “All of them together work to enhance the movie. They all take money. Because of that, the number of days just keeps increasing.”

But even as he tore into the business side, Ram Gopal Varma acknowledged the creative dominance of South Indian cinema on the national stage. “If you take the top 10 highest-grossing Indian films, most of them are South Indian films. That means the same directors, the same creators, the same stories are dominating,” he said.

But he also offered a counterintuitive take on the industry’s perceived crisis, arguing that flop films are not the disaster everyone makes them out to be. “The industry runs on flop movies, not the hit ones. All the money from hit movies goes straight to the producer and the people involved. Flop movies’ money usually gets divided among the technicians and workers,” he said. “The money doesn’t disappear. It moves from one pocket to another.”