Mpitude
Actor Rana Daggubati has opened up the nepotistic nature of the Telugu film industry. The star said that it is an industry held together by families, who give their all to make movies, going against all odds to bring their vision to life. The Telugu film industry is dominated by stars such Rana Daggubati, Mahesh Babu, Jr. NTR, Allu Arjun, Naga Chaitanya, and Prabhas, all of whom hail from film families. One of the biggest breakout stars to have emerged from the outside has been actor Vijay Deverakonda.
In an interview with Film Companion, when asked why the Telugu film industry, run by three or four big, powerful families, including his, doesn’t get the flak that Bollywood does for nepotism, Rana said the answer lies in how the industry took shape in its early days.
“I moved to Hyderabad 25 years ago from Chennai, when a bunch of Telugu people moved to another place which just had rocks, and everyone was trying to build houses and making movies in those houses. That’s what the entertainment industry was. No one wanted to be a part of this. In the early days, people would come and say, ‘Sir my son has failed 10th grade, he is not going to do anything, why don’t you make him an assistant director in your movie.’ That was our world, the kind of people who wanted to come. It was looked down upon by the elite, educated world. What was there? Just families who held it. This is what we do, this is what we will do generation after generation and create that eco-system.”
Rana said building a studio is the “stupidest thing” that a person can do, but Hyderabad has six of them. “That’s the love we have for art and storytelling.” Citing the example of Disney, Rana said it was a family company, which ultimately became a global corporation. “So all of these four-five companies that are there now, are families… Imagine a bunch of families fighting the global giants and still being more and more successful. There is also a simple metric, resources are too much in Mumbai but there you don’t have these resources. The resources are built there. It is own money, loaned money, you mortgage your home, land and make movies. Which is why the guts to make big stuff comes and that’s what it is. It is extremely exciting,” he said.
The actor is currently awaiting the release of his Netflix series Rana Naidu. An adaptation of the popular American drama Ray Donovan, the show pairs Rana Daggubati with actor Venkatesh, his uncle.
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