Rana Daggubati on what inspires industry kids like him, Dulquer Salmaan to back films like Sabar Bonda, Lokah: ‘Cinema gave us that privileged background…’

You’ve invested extensively in multiple businesses outside of films. Conventional business wisdom would tell you not to invest in indie movies like All We Imagine As Light and Sabar Bonda. What gives you the confidence as a business guy to back these projects?

Let’s take a business lens on this, and not an art lens, for some time. Most often, businesses are created when there’s an opportunity or a market gap. Most people will tell you not to go into a direction because it hasn’t been done before or some people have faced some failure before. That doesn’t mean the system is flawed. It just means the right system hasn’t been built yet. I had the privilege of growing up in different parts of India, across different film landscapes, at different points of time. We’ve been exposed to different kinds of cinema over time, but just that there was no consistency for parallel cinema, or anything that was away from the ordinary, in some ways. But whenever a filmmaker made cinema like that, it created an impact not only in India but across the world, and that lasted much more than any commercial cinema would. A film of Satyajit Ray would outlast any mainstream commercial film even today, and for a generation to come. If you become a film student, you’ll go back to cinema that probably wasn’t successful at the box office then, but became much more impactful with time. So, that’s the thought behind Spirit Media.

But it would’ve taken years to build a system at Spirit Media, given that you said one didn’t exist for the longest time?

In the early 2000s, when I started out, we were obviously very independent and naïve. We just thought if we make a film that wins awards, there’ll be an audience too. We won two National Awards, but there was no audience. That film was still quite independent despite having the voices of many big stars (Shriya Saran and Allari Naresh), but it didn’t do anything. I gradually discovered there were many films like that which were going all around the world before coming to India. I thought that was very odd. I thought if the world can appreciate something before we can appreciate it, there’s some gap. We then did C/o Kancharapalem (2018), which took every successful mainstream route out. We kept doing films like that in Telugu and Tamil (Kaantha), and always found an audience for them.

With All We Imagine As Light, your distribution went from South to pan-India. How did that happen?

All We Imagine As Light pushed us out of our comfort zone. It’s a film that first came to us because it was part-Malayalam. But then we realized it’s something the whole country can watch in different manners. It’s a story of Malayali nurses living in Mumbai, who had a Maharashtrian friend. It encompassed India in a very beautiful way. India is actually like that, but cinema doesn’t showcase it like that. We’d always attach commercial terms to it and think whether a film should be dubbed in Hindi. But All We Imagine As Light did well at the box office. It had a seven-week run, which not even many mainstream films get. It collected more on its second and third weekends than it did on the first. So, you knew this cinema needed a different kind of marketing, showcasing, and communicating. Putting that hat as an entrepreneur gave much more meaning to what I was doing. Hence, Sabar Bonda comes right after.

But what is that different kind of showcasing?

There’s a certain global accolade system, where a film goes from festival to festival, winning awards in different places. But otherwise, it’s about how to showcase it to the right, intended audience. There’s an audience out there who wants to watch, but they don’t have a consistent stream of cinema. We don’t have films like Sabar Bonda releasing every week or even every month. If we’re able to find the right balance and make it a habit, we can have cinema like this release in the second or third week of every month. Earlier, there was a big hesitation from distributors. They said, “You’re the guy who gave us Baahubali and The Ghazi Attack (2017). Why are you giving us All We Imagine As Light?” The minute they saw the success of this cinema, they realized there’s another audience they can consistently cater to. So yeah, it’s the beginning of a journey that’s going to last for a long period of time.

Still from All We Imagine As Light.

You were also one of the first South actors from your generation to do a Hindi film in Dum Maaro Dum (2011). You were a part of Baahubali: The Beginning (2015), that kickstarted the pan-India film phenomenon. And now, you’re taking Malayalam and Marathi indie films across India as a distributor. Where does this pan-India gaze come from?

When I was young, I was first exposed to Tamil cinema because I was in Chennai. Then we moved to Hyderabad, where along with Telugu movies, Hindi movies started coming into my life because Nizam is a popular territory for Hindi films. But while watching a film, we never cared if it was Tamil, Hindi, or English. As you grow up and become a part of the industry, you begin to segregate. But the audience doesn’t really care. When I was in Mumbai for Dum Maaro Dum, I was proposing to filmmakers to make films that are relevant to other audiences of other languages and can be released in multiple languages. But nobody believed me at that point. They asked why the Hindi audience would watch a Telugu film, and vice-versa. But today, everybody’s trying to do that. Sometimes, you catch trends early on, but you’ve to be able to hold on to them. We’ve been holding on to that thread for a while now, and that’s shown us consistent success.

So, you were asking everyone to make a Baahubali years before they actually made one?

That was always my intention. I didn’t know much about Hindi cinema when I first came here, but I knew the language of the filmmakers was the same everywhere. It’s just bound by region because somehow, the politics of your nation told you you’re from one state and that’s a different state. Let’s take Baahubali and Sabar Bonda, on both ends, as examples. Baahubali had no North Indian cast, except Tamannaah Bhatia, who’s as much a part of the Telugu film industry as we are. For all practical purposes, Prabhas and I were new people. Rajamouli had made Makkhi (2012), which only a few people knew about. But this film opened like a mainstream Hindi film would. So, it didn’t matter where the audience was. Similarly, for Sabar Bonda, I knew very little Marathi and watched very little Marathi cinema. The minute I watched this film, I didn’t care which region it was from. I knew the conflict and trauma of the protagonist, and I was waiting for his journey to overcome that. That goes beyond language, and is the only thing that brings us together as Indians and humans.

Baahubali starred Prabhas and Rana Daggubati among others.

But since Baahubali, there has been an attempt to consciously cast North Indian faces in big South tentpoles in order to give it that pan-India appeal. Do you think pan-India cast should be curated like that?

Casting somebody for the market isn’t right. Casting for the role is right. It didn’t matter to the audience whether Prabhas and I were Telugu or Tamil. We just looked like guys from that time who were fighting for the throne. We could be speaking any language, but you connected only because we looked the part. Sathyaraj, who played Katappa, is a veteran Tamil actor, but it didn’t matter to the audience because the minute he appeared on screen, you thought he’s Katappa. It’s just that the casting should be authentic. If your character is Malayalam-speaking, cast someone who can speak the language. That’s the care one needs to take instead. A film isn’t a deal. It’s a story. It never asked you for a North Indian face. It just chose the right people.

What did you find promising about Sabar Bonda?

It really brought out the beauty of India. We can be very modern, but there are certain traditional roots that ground us. In a Western setting, this film would’ve been much more vocal, rebellious, and hard-hitting. But in India, you just adjust to the culture and find a way to communicate with each other.

Still from Sabar Bonda.

Your father D. Suresh Babu is also a producer and distributor. Is that where the producer in you comes from?

Most of the influences in my life are from my family. Storytelling and creativity are given utmost priority. I was lucky enough to be in my late 20s and early 30s, and work in a company that was 60 years old in the entertainment business. Overtime, this is what you learn: filmmakers come and go, but truthful storytelling stands the test of time. If the company has made 100 films in the last 60 years, all the truthful films cut across time. It didn’t matter whether they were made in the 1970s or ’80s. They still hold up even today. Tentpoles keep coming, but ultimately, cinema and storytelling are about variety. You want to have different experiences in life.

Isn’t it exciting that privileged industry kids like you and Dulquer Salmaan are giving back by backing movies like Sabar Bonda and Lokah, respectively?

Cinema gave us that privileged background in the first place. So, I think it’s our job to keep doing what we are even further and further.

Finally, switching gears like you keep doing as a producer, are you excited for Baahubali: The Epic?

Even if I didn’t do anything this year, I’m going to have a big one! Baahubali, forget changing my career, changed how Indian cinema is viewed. It’s been a decade! The beauty is that the freshness and recall of that film are still as it was. We got to saw an uncut version of the two films together. I don’t think that kind of cinema has been attempted ever again.

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What do you think watching both parts of Baahubali in one go would do for the audience?

The funny part is right in the beginning, it was intended as one film. It’s just that the drama took so long to evolve that we had to make two films out of it. But now that so many people have watched both the films, you still want to go through the highs but in the connected storytelling format. It’ll be a new, fresh perspective of the film. This time, you won’t have that one question: Why did Katappa kill Baahubali? It’d be answered by the interval (laughs).