Why Singeetham Srinivasa Rao banned Sing Geetham crew from referencing his masterpieces

No templates, no old films

The first thing Singeetham Srinivasa Rao made clear when the crew sat down together was what he would not allow. No references to his own earlier work. A director with Pushpaka Vimana, Aditya 369, and Bhairava Dweepam to his name, films that remain benchmarks of formal ambition in Indian cinema, he had no interest in returning to any of them. “Singeetham had a very specific thing about that,” Ankur recalled, adding, “No reference to his earlier films. In his opinion, that template is long done and they should move on to try something new.” If anyone on the crew brought up something he had made before, the conversation ended there.

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What replaced those references surprised the younger crew entirely. Films like Emilia Perez, Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical, and Les Miserables came up in those early conversations. Not as templates to copy but as ways of understanding how form could be pushed. How a musical could exist without becoming a song-and-dance film. “We were surprised that Singeetham was so updated. We were the ones trying to catch up.”

According to Ankur C, Singeetham’s technical thinking was just as sharp. From the very first meeting, Singeetham spoke with precision about pace and rhythm. “He specifically said, ‘We are not going to think in a manner where we are sustaining a certain cut for a certain shot for a certain time, because the information is already given. What we had to say has been said. We have to be a little more fast-paced based on the rhythm of the scene,'” Ankur recalled. The crew, expecting to work with a legend who carried the weight of his own history, found something different. “I never felt that I was talking to a legend. He made us feel comfortable, like we are his technicians and we just jam. He would always allow us to push back on his ideas, and if it was valid, he would take it.”

Building the language

The central challenge of Sing Geetham was one that Indian cinema had never really posed before. “It cannot be song and dance in the traditional sense. It has to be dialogue that is sung,” Ankur said. The difference sounds subtle. It is not. In a conventional musical, songs exist outside the story, pausing the narrative for a performance. Here, the dialogue itself had to carry melody. Two characters talking had to feel like music without either of them performing. “It’s about extracting what he’s trying to say and then figuring out how to envision it and make the visual out of it,” Ankur explained.

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The process was built from scratch to reflect that. Unlike a conventional film where music is scored after the edit, the tracks for Sing Geetham arrived before shooting began. Who delivered which line, and when, was worked out in discussion between Ankur, Singeetham, executive director Sankalp Gora, and producer Nag Ashwin, and kept changing through the shoot. “There’s not one certain way to go about it. It’s just based on the flow of the scene, the flow of the film,” Ankur said.

The song that had to work

The most demanding sequence in the film was “Emaindhi Emaindhi”, the first song where the entire village realises it has been cursed to sing its words. It is the moment the audience understands what kind of film they are watching, which means everything about it had to land. “It shouldn’t feel gimmicky. It still has to fit into the rules of the world. It has to still be wacky, it has to still be fun, but it also has to fit into the logic of, oh yeah, this can happen,” Ankur C explained.

The film’s large ensemble, with junior artistEs and village characters woven into every frame, added another layer of unpredictability on set. “You need to keep an eye out for what is the scene giving us, what is a certain character giving us, and based on that you change or evolve,” he said. What made it harder was that the sequence kept escalating, each section demanding more than the one before. “Each segment became a set piece. The initial section became a set piece, and then once everybody came onto the streets, that became a set piece. It was literally not just one song. It was like four different songs in the same song.”

The shots that defined Sing Geetham

Two moments in Sing Geetham capture the kind of decision-making that ran through the entire shoot. One involved a character arriving at a tree that carries enormous emotional weight in the story, the only physical trace he has of a parent he never knew. How he should be positioned there went through several options. A top shot was considered. Sitting near the trunk was considered. “The most natural reaction of a son, when they realise this is the parent, is to just curl up,” Ankur said. The image of a figure folding into the hollow of the tree, the suggestion of returning to a womb, eventually felt like the only honest choice. The light around it was debated just as carefully. “We went back and forth on whether it should still feel like the entire thing,” he said, adding, “But then we said no, there’s something new happening. It’s like a new day emerging. Maybe we’ll just have a small dawn kind of scene.”

The pre-climax sequence presented a different challenge altogether. The idea was to show greed at its most extreme, moving through three distinct beats, each pushing further than the last. The decision to have children lead the moment came from the writing team. “How do you show that greed has imbibed into the smallest, most innocent hearts? That’s why you see the kids take up the tools to the mining site,” Ankur said. The children are also the ones who reverse it, and that choice was just as deliberate. “For them it’s like, yes, this is a problem, we will address it. As adults, we tend to think about permutations, combinations, all of that. But for them, it’s immediate.”

Directing from a distance

On the days when Singeetham Srinivasa Rao directed from home over a live feed, with a display and headset set up at his house, the crew barely noticed the difference. Notes arrived before anyone had stepped away from the monitor. “We were totally in sync. We would do a take and he would watch it, and by the end of the take he would already have a note. Maybe we should try this, maybe we should add one more actor. We never felt any difficulty in that process,” Ankur C said.

What held it together, more than the technology, was the clarity Singeetham brought to every decision, even from a distance. A director who had spent decades refusing to repeat himself, who came to this project with Emilia Perez on his mind instead of Pushpaka Vimana, was always going to find a way to make it work.