Actor Rashmika Mandanna, who was recently seen in the Ranbir Kapoor-starrer Animal, opened up about the film’s controversial director Sandeep Reddy Vanga, and said that he ‘functions differently’ from others. Rashmika played the role Geetanjali in the film, and many in the audience believed that her character was frequently mistreated by the protagonist, played by Ranbir. In a new interview, she said that Sandeep ‘enjoys making films’ and will raise the bar with the sequel, Animal Park.
In a chat with Pinkvilla, Rashmika said, “That man just functions differently. I don’t know how he thinks, what he eats or what he does. But with Animal you saw, ‘Oh, this is what the audience likes, this is what we like showing the audience, this is the story that we want to maintain’. Now, we have the whole universe. We can play around with whatever we want with Animal Park. So, it’s exciting. And the things that he told me… He’s like, ‘Man, I am going to have a blast in Animal Park,’ and he is that man who enjoys making films.”
Vanga has been responding to many of his detractors. Rashmika said that the director isn’t someone who’d change himself to pander to the masses. “He’s just like, ‘This is the story I want to say,’ and he sticks by it. He doesn’t change according to what people want him to change. So, I love that. I think that man should be protected, and he has to be like that for the rest of his life,” she said.
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Previously, veteran screenwriter Javed Akhtar criticised Animal at the 9th Ajanta-Ellora International Film Festival in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. Describing Animal’s success as ‘dangerous’, Javed said, “If there’s a film in which a man asks a woman to lick his shoe or if a man says it’s okay to slap a woman… and the film is a super hit, that’s dangerous.” In the many interviews that Vanga gave after the release of the film, he called critics ‘illiterate and uneducated’. “If everybody is going to focus just on the morality, we should stop making films. Let’s just make cartoons,” he told Connect FM Canada.
Despite the criticism, Animal managed to make over Rs 900 crore at the global box office.
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