S. S. Rajamouli's RRR starring Ram Charan and Jr. NTR continues to be the talk of the town after a successful outing at the 95th Academy Awards. With 'Naatu Naatu' in the epic action drama film winning the 'Best Original Song' at Oscars 2023 and composer M. M. Keeravani and lyricist Chandrabose bringing home the coveted golden statue, filmmaker Rajamouli's son S. S. Karthikeya recently took part in a heart-to-heart conversation with National Award-winning film critic Baradwaj Rangan, the Editor-in-Chief of Galatta Plus, and spoke about RRR's journey to the Oscars.
Speaking about how the idea for RRR for Oscars began, S. S. Karthikeya said, "The team decided to go to the Oscars and try to take that route when the fans told us to. It was their dream more than ours to begin with. So, RRR had its traditional release exactly one year ago in the U.S. and it was done. It had a great successful run. And then, an organic Western love started coming in for RRR where Americans began watching the film. Once that started, Josh Hurtado, who's been an Indian cinema lover for the past 10 years, he's always in touch with us and he said, 'there's something happening', and then we all got on call and thought about how to capitalize. Dylan then came into the picture, who's from Variance Films, the distributor in the US. Then, he came into the picture and we just wanted to do a re-release of RRR and this was sometime around June 2022 because there is some buzz among the Westerners and the Americans. They're liking the film and (we thought) let's give them a more theatrical experience. The film was going to come out on Netflix soon, but this is a theatrical movie. That was the thought."
S. S. Karthikeya further explained, "We didn't want to go big. Generally, overseas, we release a movie in more than a thousand screens. But, we released the movie targeting these American audience in niche theatres. These are not the regular movie theatres. There are a few theatres in the U.S. like the Draft House Cinema where there's a niche audience. There's one in Chicago and one in New York. Josh and the team told us about this. When a movie comes in this theatre, people (think) there's something special about this one. So, we started with 60 screens and we said we'll release it for one day. One Friday. That was the aim. So, we released the movie on June 1 and the movie was already on Netflix five days before on May 25. We started off with one day and it went on for a month. So, that release and the screens were going up, and Americans and a majority of non-Indians who came loved the film. So, they started this hashtag and they started trending saying #RRRForOscars. We thought RRR was done in terms of a great run. We thought there was something and we released the film again. We wanted to push it and now they're saying Oscars? It's a dream for anybody. Oscars is a far shot when you think about it, but we thought, 'why not?' and that's how it occured to us and we then started off."
Watch S. S. Karthikeya in conversation with Baradwaj Rangan below:
