Raju's Action-Packed Intro In RRR Was One Of The Hardest Scenes To Nail Down
S.S. Rajamouli's "RRR" is not only one of the best movies of 2022, but it's also what /Film considers one of the 100 best films of all time. Rajamouli's smash-hit is pure cinematic bliss, the kind of balls-to-the-wall fun movie theaters were made for.
Inspired by the stories of two real-life historical freedom fighters, "RRR" borrows a page from "Inglourious Basterds" and imagines its heroes as the best of buds, dancing and fighting their way through the British Raj, making the colonizers pay in blood by throwing tigers at them. It is exhilarating. It is badass. It is "RRR."
The film has many moments that seem like they should've been impossible to pull off, starting with the very first scene in the film. We begin in a police precinct besieged by a protest thousands of men strong. When one of them throws a rock and breaks a photo of the person in charge, Raju (Ram Charan) is ordered to arrest the man responsible. He leaps over a tall fence and beats the ever-loving crap out of dozens upon dozens of people. It is a moment out of "The Terminator." It is an incredible character introduction and a perfect introduction to Raju's glorious mustache.
Speaking with Awards Daily, sound designer Boloy Kumar Doloi admitted this sequence was perhaps the hardest one in the film to pull off:
"That first scene was the most difficult for me. The crowd noise, the action; there's also so much emotion in that scene. It took a long time to film and get it right. Maybe 20 days."
Rise, Roar, Revolt
Shooting an action scene with thousands of extras (and doing so in the middle of a pandemic) was no small task. As star Ram Charan told The Indian Express, the scene took 35 days to shoot, with around 3,000 people on set. This proved particularly painful for Charan, who has had a dust allergy since childhood. "Look at my fate, I had to work in dust for 35 days," he noted.
Despite the number of extras, and despite how dangerous the stunts look, nobody got hurt. As Charan explained to The Indian Express, there were over 30 days of rehearsals, and between 5,000 and 10,000 people on set on any given day. "That shows you the kind of intense rehearsals that went into it."
The result is a scene straight out of a superhero movie, one that makes the stunts and the action in the Marvel Cinematic Universe look tame. Raju beating up hundreds of rioters, while still taking hits, is somehow grounded enough not to feel ridiculously over the top. For editor Sreekar Prasad, this was a challenge.
"[Rajamouli] had a tough time with the crowd as he had to convince everybody to bay for his (Ram Charan) blood," Prasad told Cinema Express, adding:
"We had to make sure that Ram was moving through the crowd, and show him getting hit. It is to bring in some sort of realism. We couldn't take too much time here as well, as it is not logically possible for him to fend them off for too long. All this was tough and this scene went through a number of versions of editing and fine-tuning before we arrived at the final scene you saw."