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Rana Daggubati recently opened up about the film industries’ practice to formulise everything and how that won’t work anymore.
During the recently held India Today Conclave South 2023, when journalist Rajdeep Sardesai asked Daggubati if he thought the stereotype of ‘the actor’ has changed or if he felt that one no longer needed a particular kind of ‘look’ to become a star, as was the case possibly 30-40 years ago, the Telugu actor responded, “The audience always wants something new. But as an industry, we try to formulise things.”
“They don’t want to see the same person again. They don’t want to see a second Hrithik Roshan or Shah Rukh Khan as they are already there. Unless you are able to bring something unique, I don’t think there is a place for second best any more,” he added.
When asked what was the biggest challenge he ever faced, Rana Daggubati recalled his initial days in the film industry when he wanted to make it as a producer. “The biggest challenge I faced happened before I was an actor. Back then, I was trying to produce films. I produced my first film in 2005, titled Bommalata. Its festival title was A Belly Full of Dreams. It won two national awards, but the film never got a theatrical release because it was ‘so independent’. I spent two years that trying to convince actors and technicians to buy into the stories that I wanted to tell. That didn’t happen and hence I became an actor. The hard part was convincing the industry to buy into new story-telling ideas. Though it has changed dramatically now, this was the case till three years ago.”
Pointing out that Baahubali changed the way we looked at cinema forever, Daggubati said, “Most credit will go to the visionary who built it (Baahubali) that is Rajamouli because unless you have someone daring to put all these together, things don’t move. And it’s only that one story that pushes the boundaries of cinema completely. Baahubali didn’t change our careers but it changed the way we look at cinema in India. The scale of the country really came out. Storytelling at basic core and scale all came together. It set us on a path to dream big. I am happy it finally got here because I wanted it to happen many years ago. Before Baahubali, there was no sense of what was the size of Indian cinema.”
Rana Daggubati was last seen in the Netflix series Rana Naidu.
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