KK Senthil Kumar and SS Rajamouli go a long way. The two first collaborated on the film Sye (2004), and whenever Rajamouli wanted to make an ambitious project, Senthik Kumar became his go-to person. Senthil is the man behind the lens in the films Mahadheera, Eega, Baahubali: The Beginning, Baahubali: The Conclusion, and RRR. In a recent interview, the ace cinematographer opened up about working with Rajamouli, who has turned the world’s attention to Telugu cinema.
When asked if there was any instance when he had to say a sequence was not possible to shoot to Rajamouli, Senthil said that initially, it used to be hard to make the director’s vision possible. He told Film Companion, “We were not used to a lot of CGI back then. Practically, ‘how to pull it off’ was always a challenge. But with today’s technology, nothing is impossible anymore. Whatever you dream of can be achieved–only thing is you have to work hard towards it.”
At first, KK Senthil Kumar couldn’t get into the groove of SS Rajamouli’s brand of cinema. The director’s indifference to logic was something he found difficult to understand. He added, “I come from a film school where we look at things like logic and that films have to look a certain way, and all that. Getting into mass entertainment movies was a bit difficult for me to digest initially. But when I saw how audiences were reacting to it and perceiving it, I changed the way I looked at cinema. I gave into the kind of films he (Rajamouli) wanted to make and that’s how our collaborations started to work. Given the technology and the budget we have for our films, anything and everything is possible.”
Senthil Kumar says the larger-than-life sequences are possible because Rajamouli gives the time during pre-production and doesn’t restrict writers and technicians. “He gives complete freedom to think wild and come up with anything. Then it is up to us to make it work. Then we brainstorm how to achieve it. Whether we do it with CGI or practically and all that. For example, be it the Baahubali sequence where he is climbing the waterfalls or the RRR sequence of saving the kid, we all break the sequence into the smallest element. So, each one of us knows what has to be done in every scene.”
KK Senthil Kumar and Rajamouli will again team up for the upcoming mega-budget project SSMB29, starring Mahesh Babu in the lead role.
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