S.S. Rajamouli is on Song After Golden Globe Win for ‘RRR’

On Tuesday, the four-and-a-half-minute long song “Naatu Naatu,” from S.S. Rajamouli’s blockbuster film RRR, created history by winning the Golden Globe for Best Original Song. The peppy track, which begins with the words, “Not salsa, not flamenco, my brother, do you know Naatu?” beat four daunting nominees, including “Carolina” by Taylor Swift, “Hold My Hand” from Top Gun: Maverick by Lady Gaga, BloodPop and Benjamin Rice, and “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever by Rihanna and others, to take home the trophy. 

Seated around a table at the 80th Golden Globes ceremony held in Los Angeles, Rajamouli, the film’s two male leads – Ram Charan and Jr NTR – as well as the song’s composer M.M. Keeravani jumped up in happy unison when the winner’s name was announced. Keeravani, who received the trophy, said he was “thrilled” with the song’s success. ‘Naatu’ means dance

Congratulating the team on the win, Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan tweeted that he “woke up and started dancing to Naatu Naatu.”

Written by Chandrabose and sung by Rahul Sipligunj and Kaala Bhairava, the song was released in Hindi as “Naacho Naacho.” 

The high-energy dance sequence features the film’s two lead stars and was shot on the grounds of Ukraine’s Mariyinsky palace, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s official residence, when the first Covid lockdown was lifted. 

The win for “Naatu Naatu,” a song-and-dance sequence – the very “item” which often disqualifies Indian films from being taken seriously at international award ceremonies and film festivals – marks what Oscar-winning music composer A.R. Rahman said the win was, a “paradigm shift.”

But RRR is unlike any other Indian film, because Rajamouli is unlike any other director in India. 

Rajamouli, 49, who works primarily in Telugu cinema, reportedly charges Rs 100 crore to direct a film. The closest that any other Indian director comes to him is Bollywood’s Rohit Shetty, whose directorial fee is reportedly Rs 25 crore.

In his 23-year-long film career, Rajamouli has directed just 12 films, but with each movie he has expanded the market for Telugu cinema, brought in new viewers, burnished his own stellar credentials at the box office while increasing the budget of his films as well as his creative ambition and skills.

Rajamouli, with his thick silver hair and a bushy beard, is strikingly handsome and exceptionally polite. Speaking over a Zoom call soon after the release of RRR, he told this correspondent that the key to his success is “continuance” – to keep thinking big, to grow incrementally, learn from mistakes and build on successes. 

“You might know Baahubali as my first effort, but no, I was doing the effort from Magadheera (2009). I failed with Magadheera. With Eega (2012), I extended my Telugu film to Tamil, but I failed to get into Hindi [market]. Then I went in with Baahubali 1 [the producers approached Karan Johar to present the Baahubali franchise in Hindi-speaking markets]… and I succeeded in getting into India, but I didn’t succeed in getting into the world… You continuously make the effort, sometimes you fail, sometimes you succeed, but you keep making the effort continuously,” he said.  

The budget for Rajamouli’s first film, Student No. 1 (2001), was Rs 2 crore and it made Rs 13 crore at the box office. 

His two-part action-fantasy saga Baahubali, which released in 2015 and 2017, cost Rs 490 crore and collected Rs 2,500 crore at the worldwide box office. It also expanded Telugu films’ theatrical market in India from Rs 100 crore to Rs 500 crore, putting the director in a league of his own and splitting the story of the Indian box office into two parts – before and after Rajamouli.  

“Before Baahubali 1, the U.S. market for Telugu films was around Rs 8 to 10 crore. Baahubali 1 made it Rs 25 crore, and the gross collections of its sequel, Rs 160 crore, made it grow further,” said Jalapathy Gudelli, editor and chief critic of telugucinema.com.

Rajamouli, who has never made a Bollywood film with Bollywood stars, cast Ajay Devgn and Alia Bhatt in RRR to widen its appeal in India and abroad.  

RRR, made on a Rs 580-crore budget, released on March 25th in 21 countries, including the U.S., U.K., U.A.E., Australia and New Zealand, beat Robert Pattinson’s The Batman with its opening worldwide weekend collections in the U.K.

“What happened with RRR is that the Western audiences, particularly in America and England, started liking the film. I thought initially it was okay, I’ve got appreciation from some Western audiences. But this was much bigger, much larger… There is something here that’s really, really breaking the boundaries and really enthralling. I didn’t expect that to happen,” Rajamouli said. And he built on that excitement, re-releasing the film in the U.S. in August even though it was available on streaming platforms. 

Telugu cinema’s three biggest markets are Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and the United States because one in every four Indians going to the U.S. is a Telugu person and Telugu is the fastest-growing language in the U.S.

The film smashed several records and became the third highest grossing Indian film worldwide after Baahubali 2 and K.G.F 2.

Rajamouli, says Shobu Yarlagadda, the producer of the Baahubali franchise, has always had a passion for making big films. “Big in the sense that he likes larger-than-life characters, larger-than-life set pieces, action pieces,” Yarlagadda said.

But “big doesn’t mean complex,” Rajamouli says, with Zen-like calm.

The long list of trivia about the making of RRR is intimidating. 

The film was shot for more than 300 days in Hyderabad, Pune, Bulgaria and Ukraine. It took six months of action rehearsals to prep for the interval animal-action sequence, followed by 65 nights to film it. The climax episode alone took 30 nights to shoot. And all this despite the fact that about 75 percent of RRR – or 2,800 shots – is CGI.

But encased in this all high-tech, make-believe world is a simple story about two simple men driven by simple emotions – love, honor and revenge – which seems to have caught the imagination of the Western audience and critics as well, with some calling RRR “bigger than Ben-Hur” and others hailing Rajamouli as “an artist of a distinctive temperament and talent.” 

“He likes to push himself from his comfort zone. He likes to learn… Whether it’s visual effects, or other aspects of filmmaking, he pushes himself to learn and understand and grow… If you see from his early days, at every point he has pushed and altered or changed his game. And the other big factor [that sets him apart from others] is that when he takes on a project, he’s 100 percent committed to that. He will give whatever amount of time that is required. It is not like, ‘I have to finish it in one year or six months or two years.’ He will push himself, give the time that is required to make that project happen,” Yarlagadda said about Rajamouli.

At the Golden Globes, RRR was nominated in the Best Non-English Language Film, but lost to Argentina, 1985. 

Rajamouli, who won the Best Director award presented by the New York Film Critics Circle last week, has now set his eyes on the Oscars where RRR has made the eligibility cut.

Though several other Indian films are in the running, including Gangubai Kathiawadi, Kantara, The Kashmir Files, Marathi films Me Vasantrao and Tuzhyasthi Kahihi, Rocketry: The Nambi Effect, Tamil film Iravin Nizhal and Kannada movie Vikrant Rona, the buzz about RRR is the loudest.