An Interview With 'Baahubali' Director SS Rajamouli: The Beginning

You might expect a film director who has had 10 successful films in a row— including the highest grossing movie his country has ever seen—to be arrogant, self-congratulatory, or at least a tiny bit prideful about his work. But in my recent conversation with India’s SS Rajamouli, the master storyteller behind the war epic/romanceBaahubali: The Beginning, I found him to be humble, gracious and delightfully down-to-earth.

In this, the first part of my two-part interview with Raja (as he asked me to address him), we talked about the process of making Baahubali, about his numerous collaborations with his screenwriting father, Vijayendra Prasad, and his lifelong love of India’s epics and myths. In part 2 we’ll discuss Raja’s creative process, his perceptions about the contrasts between filmmaking in India and Hollywood, and his future film projects.

Rob: One of the great legendary Hollywood stories is about David Lean spending 18 months shooting Lawrence of Arabia in the scorching heat in the deserts of Jordan and Morocco and in an arid riverbed in Spain. People thought he had gone insane because he went to such extremes. Francis Coppola also spent a year and a half shooting Apocalypse Now, worrying for much of that period that he had lost his mind. You spent double that amount of time shooting just the first half of Baahubali under extremely challenging conditions. Should we all be worried about your sanity?

Raja: (he laughs) Actually, if you look at it, traditionally the number of shooting days here in India are very high. 150 shooting days is quite normal, which is not the case in Hollywood, as I am told.  Most of the big films there are done in 70 or 80 days.

That’s true, and many are even shorter. I’m producing a film now that shot in only 22 days.

(surprised) In 22 days? That’s fast. We spend a little bit less time on preproduction, and more time on production. That’s just how our practice developed here. Of course for Baahubali we spent 380 days, more than double the typical amount of shooting days. But please don’t worry about my sanity, I’m quite sane and ready and raring to go at the second part [Baahubali: The Conclusion].