The films of S.S. Rajamouli have consistently pushed the scale of Indian filmmaking – with blockbusters such as “RRR,” before that the “Baahubali” films. His upcoming feature “Varanasi,” set to release in April 2027, is set to go even further – set across thousands of years and locations as remote and Antarctica, the plot seeing the eponymous city of Varanasi facing down an asteroid. Even the size of the frame is expanding, with the feature to be shot in part on 70mm Imax film.
Following his appearance at the Annecy Animation Festival work-in-progress panel to introduce the filmmakers of “Baahubali: The Eternal War,” Variety spoke to Rajamouli about progress on “Varanasi.” “What I can say is we have completed a major portion of the shoot, all the important big spectacle action sequences are done,” Rajamouli says. We are [now] into doing the smaller, interconnecting scenes so hopefully, by September, maybe a little bit into October, we should be finishing shooting.” When discussing whether shooting the film on the Imax format had influenced the way he had approached the film creatively, Rajamouli says that it’s quite the opposite.
“From the beginning, we knew the sequences that were conceived would be best justified in [the] Imax format – we didn’t change anything just for the format,” he says, noting that any adjustments made were minor. “Because our eyes have been trained to shoot in the CinemaScope format, which obviously I love, [we were] just thinking about, we need to frame this [to] look good both in Imax as well as CinemaScope, the anamorphic framing, so that took a little bit of adjustment for the first few initial days. Then we understood how to do it.”
