It was like a campaign trail in the villages surrounding Kurnool. We followed the heavily crowded procession led by Nandamuri Balakrishna accompanied by Jayasudha and Rehman and a few other actors. Someone from the crowd commented that in that elderly get-up Balakrishna resembled his father N. T. Ramarao from some of his later day movies like Major Chandrakanth and Justice Chowdhary . The pleased producer M. L. Kumar Chowdhary smiled. The shoot was taking place for his third production (in all he made 11 films earlier) under the banner tentatively titled Adhinayakudu . “Balakrishna plays a triple role and the story spans three generations. Jayasudha, Sukanya and Lakshmi Rai play the female lead opposite Balakrishna's triple roles. the elderly, the middle aged and the young respectively,” he said as the song Adigo Adigo…Sambadu blared from the nagra. Hundreds of people voluntarily participated in the shoot as the campaign moved from one village to the other. Balakrishna waved at them and the crowd went into a frenzy. That they were a disciplined lot made things easy for director Paruchuri Murali and cinematographer Surender Reddy.
Is the content faction-based? Kumar Chowdhary refutes it; “Murali who had directed two hit films earlier for us ( Pedababu and Andhrudu which won two Nandi awards) has come up with a novel story. The lead character wants to develop the area but he faces opposition from vested interests. Pradeep Rawat plays the main villain. Kota Srinivasa Rao plays a politician with negative shades, Murali Sharma a police officer and Charan Raj and Aditya Menon are in key roles. Rehman plays a central role as a brother. Each character has its own importance including the heroines. Saloni makes a special appearance. Paruchuri Murali keeps all the rasa s in mind while writing a movie script. Emotions, sentiment, humour and action are all well balanced in his script. Brahmanandam plays a comic and pivotal character that travels throughout with Balakrishna. Venumadhav is also in the cast,” he said.
The rhythmic music from the song captivates one's attention. Kalyani Malik had earlier worked for Chowdhary's Andhrudu . “We have four commercial songs and two montage songs. The one that we are shooting now comes as a background song. You find melody and variety in every song. Apart from giving melodious music, background score is Kalyani Malik's specialty.” One duet was shot in Malaysia while three songs wereshot in RFC. He elaborates, “We created an expansive and expensive set in Vizag to shoot some very important scenes. The action blocks are well choreographed by Ram-Laxman.”
He stops for a while and looking at his hero he says with pride, “Balakrishna plays the triple role for the first time in his career. The uniqueness is that each character is dealt with separately and they do not interact with each other like in earlier triple-role movies. That's where the difference lies. In 2010 Balakrishna's Simha received record collections, in 2011 his Sri Ramarajyam won critical acclaim and mark my word in 2012, our film with Balakrishna will win both record collections and critical acclaim.” He signed off on that positive note. Now in postproduction work, the release is planned for the end of January 2012.
