Why Nag Ashwin Chose To Cast Major Actors From Across India In Kalki

MUMBAI, (IANS) – Director Nag Ashwin is currently receiving a lot of positive response for ‘Kalki 2898 AD’ which stars Kamal Haasan, Amitabh Bachchan, Deepika Padukone and Prabhas.

The film has netted Rs 536 crore in India and looks unstoppable. Talking about his state of mind given the stellar response to the film on the box office, the director labeled it as “a lot of satisfaction.” He added, “I’m also a little bit overwhelmed because it has been a long journey for everyone involved in the film.”

Sharing the reason behind casting actors from practically every film industry of India, Nag Ashwin said, “In a way, it was a commercially driven decision, but I wanted representation from every language or state in our film. So, we consciously tried to take artistes from across the country be it Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi and others.”

It has been a long and arduous journey for every artiste on the film, given its scale. How did he keep the passion alive during all these years? The director said, “The core of the story was something that excited me, and I knew that once we started, it would be very hard because what we were trying to do was linked to Mahabharata, which is the greatest Indian epic.”

He further mentioned that his team and his producers constantly supported him, and it was because of the collective energies that it became possible otherwise it would have been much harder to mount and deliver this film.

When asked about the trick to handle so many big stars in the film, the director said that all the actors involved in the project were thorough professionals which made his job much easier.

“All the stars are so mature and experienced that they knew exactly what they needed to do, and they knew their purpose. They made life quite easy for us on the sets, and being such great actors, they really elevated what was there on paper to something much greater,” he said.