It would not be wrong to say that ‘Ponniyin Selvan 1’ emerged to be a great success and collected over Rs 400 crore at the box office. But there were several people who found issues with Mani Ratnam’s ambitious project, one of them being that the film didn’t have larger-than-life theatrical moments like ‘Baahubali’. The war sequences were too put under scanner that they lacked the impact of SS Rajamouli’s projects.
However, Mani Ratnam in a recent interview revealed that he did not want ‘Ponniyin Selvan’ to be anything like ‘Baahubali’. In an interview with Cinema Express, Mani Ratnam talked about the comparison between ‘Ponniyin Selvan’ and SS Rajamouli’s ‘Baahubali’.
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He said, “We were very clear about it. Baahubali is Baahubali. Only Rajamouli can do it. When we started, we were clear that we didn’t want to do it like that. There is liberty there (Baahubali). There… The characters are fictional. They can be superheroes. Everything is imaginary. For me, Ponniyin Selvan is a book written by Kalki. Arulmozhi Varman and Aditya Karikalan are real people. So, I wanted to show them as realistically as possible.”
He added, “If they say the war sequences are not like Baahubali, I am so happy. We wanted it to not be anything like Baahubali. I want to be inside the war rather than keeping it (the camera) from outside and showing something big… I have a problem with it because it looks digital. It looks false.”
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The filmmaker had time and again spoken highly of ‘Baahubali’ and SS Rajamouli, mentioning that ‘Ponniyin Selvan’ wouldn’t exist if Rajamouli hadn’t made ‘Baahubali’.
The second and final part of ‘Ponniyin Selvan 2’ will be releasing this Friday, and will conclude the five-part novel of Kalki Krishnamurthy.
