Kalki 2898 AD has breached the Rs 900-crore mark at the worldwide box office and director Nag Ashwin couldn’t be happier. The 38-year-old director of films like Yevade Subramanyam and Mahanati, who has been praised for his vision in the star-studded post-apocalyptic drama that blends Indian mythology with science fiction, was on a much-deserved holiday when t2 caught up with Ashwin — popularly known as Nagi — for a chat.

It has been two weeks since the release of Kalki 2898 AD and the euphoria continues. It must still be quite overwhelming...

Definitely! The first few days were a lot more overwhelming, especially the first weekend, but even now there is so much love. So many people, so many strangers make it a point to reach out and thank and congratulate me for Kalki 2898 AD. I am very, very grateful.

What has been the most special feedback so far?

A person I don’t know put out an Instagram post saying how he was waiting in the rain at a bus stop and he heard two school kids arguing about something connected to Arjun and Karna and discussing The Mahabharata after watching the film. That man tagged me and wrote: ‘This is what you have done’. That definitely touched me a lot.

At what point of writing and shooting Kalki 2898 AD did you realise the film could possibly have this kind of a widespread impact?

To be honest, we couldn’t really predict how or what it was going to do. We just wanted to make the film that we set out to make and make sure that those who had invested in the project didn’t lose any money.

With a film of this scale, one really has no choice but to keep working till the last minute because so much post-production work is involved. So I was pretty much working till almost the day of release, whether it was on the visual effects or the music. One doesn’t have time to sit back and wait and think till the movie releases.

Once the film released and we started getting the kind of response we did, it actually was very new for all of us in the team. We did want the audience to accept the world of the film and connect back to Indian mythology, specifically The Mahabharata, and we were glad that all of it happened very enthusiastically among a large section of the audience.
But before release, we never really had the time or the luxury to think.

What made you want to blend mythology and sci-fi, a mix of which has proven to be mostly tricky and largely unsuccessful in Indian cinema?

It was the simple love for these two genres. I grew up watching mythological films in Telugu. As a kid, I remember watching them at my grandparents’ house. That had a huge impact on me, though they were not nicely done and the production values were quite low. One could literally see the bows and arrows being held up by wires! (Laughs) But it was all very fascinating to me.

At that time, I also got introduced to sci-fi from the West, especially Star Wars. What made an impression on me was seeing how effortlessly real that world looked though it had lightsabers and flying spaceships... despite all of this, it didn’t look fake, it didn’t look like a video game. I loved that aesthetic and when I became a filmmaker, trying to put these genres I loved together was always at the back of my mind. That finally culminated in Kalki.

Are there any sequences in the film that sounded great on paper but that you were a little apprehensive about how they would translate on screen?

The climax with Bhairava’s (Prabhas) big reveal was definitely one. For me, to attempt anything from The Mahabharata cinematically was a daunting thing. That is because we haven’t done much of it in our cinema and whatever has been attempted, we haven’t done it very well. I needed to do a real good job and if I was given time even now to work on that aspect, I would still keep at it (smiles). We put in a lot of effort and I am glad that the audience has accepted it in the right way.

You managed to round up a cast to kill for! Did you write the principal characters keeping the actors who play them in mind or did that come in later?

That came later. We wrote the script first and pitched it to my producers. We had a few months of discussions and then decided who to approach for their respective roles. I feel very grateful that I managed to get pretty much the first options we had on our list of actors for the film. They all believed in the film and agreed to go ahead and that was a big win for us.

Besides the obvious challenges of story and scale, what were the relatively smaller challenges of making a film like this?

The VFX and action and putting it all together was very challenging, and all the more because we were trying out many things that were new. Apart from that, the time it took to make the film was a mental and emotional challenge. When you make a film for so long — in the case of Kalki, it took us more than four years — you find yourself to be in a space that not many filmmakers are in. Most films, even the big ones, take a maximum of two or two-and-a-half years to be made. When you decide to make your film for longer, then it is like going to war (smiles). Being in that four-year-plus zone is a very unique space to be in as a filmmaker because there is judgment and perspective and I found that the hardest.

How did you overcome that? Did you second-guess yourself at certain points?

Yes, for sure. But my producers (Vyjayanthi Films) were a big support, along with the whole crew, as I spent time figuring out how to do things in the best way. Now that the film has worked, we are all happy. But the last year was definitely the toughest.

Was the idea for the landscape of post-apocalyptic Kasi always what we get to see eventually in the film?

It was. For a film like Kalki, you really have to get these things down on paper and have your concept art ready before you go in to shoot, or actually even before that. There were a number of things that we had to design from the ground up. Even that plate that Deepika (Padukone, who plays SUM80/ Sumati) eats from, a lot of thought and work went into designing that. That design element was applicable to the spoon and even the food that was on her plate. And all of this was done for what was just a one-second shot! There were so many little things like that, few of which were pretty overwhelming to pull off.

Giving Amitabh Bachchan an action role at age 81 and then seeing him run with it. What was that experience like?

We have all known him as the angry action man. He has years of action experience behind him. Honestly, I didn’t set out to do anything special with Bachchan sir, but I knew that Ashwatthama had to be him! He is the only one who could portray the depth of emotions, the pain that Ashwatthama had been living with for centuries. It needed somebody of that stature. And his look turned out to be so beautiful.

We have had a young team at work on Kalki and every day, one would see us just running around and figuring stuff out. Bachchan sir was always on set and he had remarkable patience with all of us. His support was huge.

What you did very well was to deeply explore Prabhas’ inherent poker-faced humour in his portrayal of Bhairava...

The character was written like that. There was a lot of it in the script but Prabhas would come up with a few things which were just him, which I couldn’t write anyway because it is just his personality... and they worked pretty well.

One hears that about 20 days of work has been done on the Kalki sequel and then stopped. What happened?

This film was always meant to be shot and narrated in two parts and for that, we have already shot a few days for the second film, which was anyway being done parallelly. But at some point, we stopped so that we could only focus on Part One. We have to get back to Part Two soon.

You have some delightful cameos in Kalki 2898 AD, but most audis have erupted seeing filmmakers SS Rajamouli and Ram Gopal Varma acting in the film. That must count as very special to you...

They were game! They knew that we were trying to do something very big and difficult and if this was the help I asked for from them, they were more than happy to come on board very graciously. And directing two directors was fun... I didn’t have to do anything!