Rajamouli reveals effort to prevent Varanasi leaks and drone mishap at title launch

Director S S Rajamouli shares how his team worked tirelessly to prevent leaks from Varanasi, expressing frustration after a random drone captured a still. The film, starring Mahesh Babu, introduces Premium Large Scale Format technology for IMAX.

Hyderabad: Ace director S S Rajamouli has now explained the amount of effort his team took to ensure that the content of their film was not leaked and also expressed his pain at how a random drone operated by unscrupulous elements had, despite their best efforts, managed to leak a still from his much-awaited magnum opus, ‘Varanasi’.

At the title announcement event of the film, which features Mahesh Babu in the lead, the makers attempted to screen the title teaser on a giant screen they had erected for the purpose. Initially, there were technical glitches. However, the makers set it right and treated fans to a splendid title teaser.

---

Director S S Rajamouli, while waiting for the technical glitches to be fixed, explained the reason for the issue.

Stating that they had set up a giant screen to give the audiences a feel of the scale and scope of this film, Rajamouli said, “We were doing everything. We were supposed to test our video last night. But to make sure that the teaser shouldn’t leak, we used huge cranes to cover this place with black cloths and worked late into the night. At about 2 am, we started testing our test videos, without playing our teaser. We don’t know where these people came. I don’t know if it was one or two of them. They started taking a drone and used it to make a video out of whatever we were supposed to show. They put it out on the Internet. That is one year of hard work of so many people. Thousands and thousands of man hours and crores and crores of Rupees. There was so much of hard work. All that was leaked by one drone flying randomly. We did not know what to do. We did not even test our video fearing it could be leaked. We wanted to show it in full scale and full resolution and we thought we would take a risk.”

The makers of the eagerly awaited magnum opus announced the title of the film as ‘Varanasi’ and also disclosed that Mahesh Babu plays a character called Rudhra in the film.

The director went on to say that he was proud to say that they were introducing a new technology to Indian cinema called Premium Large Scale Format Filmed For IMAX.