Directors learn a lot of lessons from their first film. Onamalu fetched good reviews but lacked proper marketing and Kranti Madhav had little clue about publicity and release in theatres. This time he has been spared, he has a sound producer who trusted his story and him and is now handling everything; all the director had to do was pick his cast and extract performances from them. Kranti Madhav had written the story long back and waited for Onamalu to release. “After Onamalu I thought I should tell a love story and I worked on it. Onamalu is a tribute to my grandfather and I was like a first standard student when I made Onamalu where I learnt the intricacies of filmmaking. With all those experiences, this time my new film Malli malli idhi rani roju, I’ve used a different packaging, backdrop, content and narration.”
The director has a strong opinion on love and finds the superlatives attached to it meaningless.
He adds, “You must have heard of eternal love, and that love is unconditional. The point generally discussed and addressed is true and I don’t contradict it. But the adjectives eternal, selfless and every thing that is heightened demeans and strips the value from the word love. Love is minus all these superlatives and why do you have to heighten the meaning by adding something to it?”
So, what did he do to make his love story different? The director says he did a lot of thinking before writing the script on the concept of true and divine love and observed that only the relationship between plants and animals is real, selfless, silent and without complaints. He evolved a story with man as a social animal and wanted to convey the point through a beautiful story about two lives and one soul. Plants and animals live in perfect synchrony and he says this beautiful phenomenon has always existed. But where is the conflict point? “Purity of love in people should be at that level.”
The film was shot in Visakhapatanam before it was hit by Hudhud and also in Malaysia and Pondicherry.
