HanuMan director Prashanth Varma on following RRR model, approaching Kantara star Rishab Shetty to play Vibhishan

Excerpts from the interview:

How did you come up with the concept of making a superhero film based on a character from Indian mythology?

I always wanted to make a superhero film but I couldn’t afford it. It is only after the success of my previous film Zombie Reddy (2021), I approached the producer that I had this very cool superhero film idea, and it is inspired by our Indian itihaasas (history). If you look at my previous works, it has references to characters from our history. So this is the film I always wanted to make and create a series of superhero films inspired by our itihaas.

 

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Did you expect HanuMan to receive so much love from the audience all over India? The film is performing even better than Telugu heavyweight Mahesh Babu’s Guntur Kaaram, directed by Trivikram Srinivas?

As a huge fan of Mahesh Babu sir I want that film to do equally well. But I think people have embraced this film right from the announcement, teaser and trailer and now in cinemas. There are two kinds of films, one is where people go to the cinemas to see how the film is, whether it is good or bad. Very occasionally there will be films where people go to the theatre hoping that the film is good, and you want the film to work. It has happened with films like Mahanadi, with Baahubali, and it has happened with HanuMan.

In the trailer of HanuMan we see Teja Sajja sunning besides a cheetah, fans were reminded of Jr NTR racing a tiger in RRR. Was the sequence inspired by the SS Rajamouli directorial?

It wasn’t inspired, but when we conceived that scene, did the story boarding and finally shot the scene, it looked like we copied it from triple RRR. However, we had to remove it from the final film because the cheetah’s VFX was not looking good. Even in the trailer people said that everything is looking good except that cheetah sequence. We had spent one year on ten shots but we still couldn’t reach the quality so I had to remove the sequence from the film.

I think in the second release (of HanuMan itself) we are going to rework on few shots in the film and we’ll have a wider second release for the international audience like RRR. We want to follow the same path and I think the foreign audience will also love the film.

The exponential growth of HanuMan in just a few days after being released in theatres has reminded fans about Rishab Shetty’s Kantara’s success. He too made a film on a topic of his belief which turned out to be a big hit…

In fact I wanted Rishab Shetty sir to play Vibhishan’s role in this film but he was quite busy with the prequel of Kantara so he couldn’t do it. But this is just the first film, I am sure we’ll find something great for Rishab sir (in the upcoming films).

Did you expect a Telugu film that’s made on a limited budget would become a pan India success?

It was supposed to be just a small little Telugu film. But how Hanuman ji doesn’t know his powers until somebody tells him that you are very powerful, like that we never believed the scale of this film. People kept telling us that the Hindi audience will love this film, even when we had initial screenings before the release of the film, people kept telling us ‘North (India) mein aag laga degi (It’ll be a superhit in North India)’. (Laughs) So I was like why only North, South Indians will also like the film because we also worship the lord the same way North people do. But surprisingly we opened with 1600 theatres (all over India) which is four times the Telugu release and the audience is loving it here. I am seeing video reactions and people are going ‘Jai Shri Ram,’ ‘Jai Hanuman,’ and are hooting for the climax, as a filmmaker I can’t ask for more.