After Animal and Sam Bahadur locked horns on December 1, film lovers are now looking forward to another clash of the titans at the box office. While Shah Rukh Khan’s third film of the year Dunki is slated for a release on December 21, Prabhas and Prithviraj Sukumaran’s Salaar: Part 1 – Ceasefire will hit the screens a day later on December 22. The pre-release buzz surrounding both of these films are providing a stiff competition to one another and only time will tell whether it is Rajkumar Hirani’s saga or Prashanth Neel’s magnum opus that will emerge as the winner.
Prithviraj, however, doesn’t want to take a pick between his film and Dunki. In an exclusive conversation with News18 Showsha, he reveals that he can’t wait to watch the SRK starrer on the big screen. “I’m really looking forward to watching Dunki. I’m a huge Shah Rukh Khan fan. I’m also a big fan of Rajkumar Hirani,” he shares.
In fact, he’s equally excited for a big-ticket Malayalam film starring Mohanlal that’s also scheduled to release on December 21. “As a film lover, I think it’s the greatest holiday season ever, at least in Kerala, because we’ve Salaar, Dunki and Neru. Neru is a Mohanlal-Jeethu Joseph film and they’re collaborating after Drishyam 2. We get to have three really big films at the box office and I’m watching all three for sure,” he tells us.
Unlike Dunki, Salaar is set to release across five languages – Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi. Reacting to the ongoing conversation about multilingual releases becoming the order of the day and how ‘everyone is after the pan-Indian pie’, Prithviraj argues that a pan-Indian film hasn’t got anything to go with casting actors from different industries.
The Bro Daddy and Kuruthi actor explains, “Baahubali, which marked the beginning of the movement, was made with Telugu stars. Same goes with KGF or Kantara, which is an even more gratifying example. You’ve to choose a story that you want to tell, write a script, be honest to what’s on paper and try and make the best version of that script. Salaar is an A-list release in every language in India. And we made it honestly and not as a pan-Indian film.”
Prithviraj also reveals that Prashanth wasn’t looking at casting actors from different markets just to create a pan-Indian project. He realised it when he told the maker that he wouldn’t be able to do the film due to the pandemic. Talking about it, he says, “If all he wanted was a star, I wasn’t the only option. He’s Prashanth Neel and after KGF 2, he could’ve gone to anybody. In his mind, Prithviraj was Vardharaja Mannar. I’m also equipped enough as a filmmaker and an actor to read a script and hear a narration and understand if they’re after the star or the actor. The idea is to let the actor make the decision and not the star.”
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