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On Saturday, Baahubali and RRR filmmaker SS Rajamouli unveiled the title of his next adventure fantasy film, starring Mahesh Babu, Priyanka Chopra and Prithviraj Sukumaran. Tentatively titled Globetrotter, the film’s final title reveal was done at a grand event in Hyderabad’s Ramoji Film City. The film is now titled Varanasi. Not just that, Rajamouli even revealed that one of the film’s sequences is based on the Indian epic, the Ramayana.
“Since my childhood, I’ve spoken many times about what the Ramayana and Mahabharata mean to me, and how making them is my dream project. I never imagined I would get to shoot an important episode from the Ramayana this early. While writing every scene and every dialogue, I felt like I was floating,” said Rajamouli at the event.
While the filmmaker has been toying with adapting another Indian epic, the Mahabharata, for the big screen, his past few films have featured glimpses of mythological figures, whether it’s those of Lord Shiva in Prabhas in the Baahubali franchise or Lord Rama in Ram Charan in the climactic action sequence of RRR in 2022. SS Rajamouli revealed he got goosebumps looking at Mahesh Babu dressed up as Rama.
“On the first day, when Mahesh came in Lord Rama’s get-up for the photoshoot, I got goosebumps. I was torn. Mahesh has the charm of Krishna, but the calmness of Rama. Still, I was confident. I even set that photo as my wallpaper… and then removed it,” revealed Rajamouli, adding, “We shot this sequence for 60 days, and we completed it recently. Every single day was a challenge. Every episode and sub-episode felt like a film by itself, everything had to be reimagined and freshly planned. Crossing all those hurdles, we finally wrapped the sequence. I believe it will be one of the most memorable portions of the film.”
At the event, SS Rajamouli also criticized the leak of the Varanasi teaser and said that it’s because a drone captured the footage while they were trying to test it for the event. “We ambitiously decided to set up this massive LED screen and brought in the best LED panels. To power it all, we needed more than 45 generators. Yesterday, we were supposed to test everything, the cranes, the black cloth, the video. During the test, someone started capturing drone footage and uploaded our content onto social media as if it were from Netflix,” he said.
Watch | Varanasi teaser: Mahesh Babu to play Rudhra in SS Rajamouli’s time-travel adventure
“That is one year of our hard work, thousands of hours by hundreds of people, and crores of rupees all leaked because of one drone flying randomly. We couldn’t even test our video properly. We are scared of more leaks now. We took a risk and it didn’t work. A power glitch is happening,” added Rajamouli.
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