Producer Charmme Kaur spills the beans about her recent movie Liger which made headlines for its stellar cast.
When asked about the Vijay Deverakonda-starrer being delayed, Charmme shares, “We started the first schedule of Liger in January 2020, we met Karan Johar in 2019, and it has come out in 2022. We held back from coming to theatres for three years as we were extremely confident that Liger was a theatrical release irrespective of the first and second lockdowns, third wave, or theatres opening to 50% occupancy. It was our responsibility to let other major films, such as RRR and Pushpa: The Rise, come out first. Then, we lost summer and rain arrived, so we had to release on August 25. We faced constant hurdles, but we never gave up.”
While most films aren’t well-received at the box office, Charmme has a different take on it. She says, “Definitely, people have access to better content in one click just by sitting at home. The whole family can watch the biggest budget films on television, and until you don’t really excite them, they aren’t coming to the theatres. But, this is not the case in Bollywood. In August, three Telugu films - Bimbisara, Sita Ramam, and Karthikeya 2 - did phenomenally well, which made 150–170 crores. It happened in the same country. It is difficult to understand since it doesn’t mean people in the South are crazy for films. It is a scary and depressing situation.”
Liger has recently made headlines for its stellar cast. “Ramya Krishnan is a dear friend, and I call her the Meryl Streep of India. However, she is big down South. She just needs the right films in other regions. She was just a phone call away and she got excited about seeing her. We narrated the script to Vijay and he said it’s a ‘mental mass’. I was lucky since Karan was just a one-call way. He called us to Mumbai to hear the film and we signed the papers the next morning. We wanted to cast a young girl from the Hindi film industry. Hence, called Ananya (Panday) and she came on board.”
On a parting note, she also talks about the long-on-going South debate. “Mani Ratnam sir, RGV sir have always made pan-India films. Even actors like Ramya, Sridevi ji, Kamal Haasan sir too have done pan-India back in the 90s. It's just that for young people, the word ‘pan-India’ is unfamiliar,” she concludes.
