One of the most shared and discussed posts among film artistes and technicians on Monday was the one written by filmmaker R.S. Vimal. It was in connection with the first anniversary of his debut film Ennu Ninte Moideen he posted the snap of a note written by him to recollect the memories of his first movie. In the same post, he has stated about his preparations for his upcoming film Karnan, which interestingly has a whopping budget of Rs 300 crore, making it the costliest movie in Malayalam.
Quizzed about it, Vimal says, “Yes, as mentioned in the letter, our film will cost around Rs 300 crore. As the story is set against the backdrop of Mahabharatha, we have to recreate the complete properties of that era. Moreover, we have to film the entire Mahabharatha war. That means, we have to invest more on set and visual effects.”
He points out that Karnan is being filmed in four languages. “Karnan will be filmed in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi simultaneously. Along with that, the film will be dubbed in other Indian languages and English. So there is no point in bothering about the revenue as we are not eying audiences from a particular region. As of now, we are planning to release the film on 7,000 screens at a time. Another important point is that the cast of Karnan will have only one Malayalam actor — Prithviraj. The rest of the actors will be prominent stars from other industries mentioned above,” he says.
The production of the film will begin in two months at Ramoji Rao Film City, Hyderabad. “We are waiting for the completion of the ongoing shoot of Baahubali -2. Once it gets completed, we will start our set works there and then begin shoot. We are expecting around one year to complete the shoot and post-production works. The release date will be fixed only after the post-production,” says the director Vimal also heads the Vfx team of the movie.
