Director Prasanth Varma, who is awaiting the release of his upcoming superhero film ‘HanuMan’, has shared that during his childhood, he always got spiders on his hand thinking it would bite him and he would become Spiderman.
The director recently spoke and shared that he always wanted to make a superhero film but he never had that market. Being a “small filmmaker” in Telugu, his films were critically and commercially successful, but it was not enough to make a superhero film.
He told: “I was trying different genres. I’ve done a psychological thriller, an investigative drama and I’ve done a zombie film. But I always wanted to get into this superhero universe. So then after the big success of ‘Zombie Reddy’, I was confident enough that I could make a superhero film and market it well so that we could make that money.”
“When we thought we should make a superhero film, I wondered, should I make a superhero film that doesn’t have powers or someone who has powers? As a kid, I was always trying to get spiders on my hand so that I would become Spiderman. That’s where it came from and I decided that superheroes should have powers. I’m very inspired by all the characters from our Itihasas. Each of them has a very unique quality and very unique strength.”
The director feels that creating a new superhero is very difficult because the number of superheroes out there are way too many. Talking about what pushed him to make this film, he said: “My strength is the knowledge about our culture. So I thought we should bring a story of a superhero out of our culture and then the idea of ‘HanuMan’ came. So that’s why I decided to give him the character of Lord Hanuman.”
He further mentioned that he is obsessed with technology and also made use of the current technological landscape in his film.
He said: “We’ve used a lot of standard tools but I used a lot of AI for the film too. I’ve generated a few shots in AI. Unreal. Of course, we used to cover a couple of sequences. But the new thing that we used is AI. Softwares like Mid-Journey and all that and creative designs. Almost all the posters have layers from images generated by pay.”
Talking about the “coolest equipment” that he has used in the film, he said: “I used every possible camera equipment that I could afford. So, I think the coolest equipment that I used for this film is the Mocobot, the camera was pretty expensive. I could never afford it, but with this film, I convinced my producer and I shot two action sequences with that. It’s pretty amazing.”
Talking about his inspiration, he said: “I think if you look at other cinemas and start writing your stories, you can never make great cinema. You can never make original cinema. Great art always comes out of life. I watch a lot of cinema just to understand the technicalities of it and all that but my stories mostly come from life and also our culture.”
‘HanuMan’ releases in cinemas in multiple languages on January 12.