Rishab Shetty breaks down Kantara’s climax, says he was so ‘ferocious’ while shooting it he could’ve actually ‘killed’ someone
Rishab Shetty, the director, and star of the Kannada language hit Kantara, broke down a handful of key scenes in a new video shared by Netflix. The word-of-mouth sensation is streaming in the original Kannada language on Prime Video, and in Hindi on Netflix. Kantara debuted in theatres a few months ago and has since generated more than Rs 400 crore in box office revenue. In the six-minute video, Shetty spoke about the film’s pre-climax fight sequence, as well as the widely-appreciated climactic scene in which the lead character Shiva is possessed by a spirit. Shetty detailed the physical and emotional toll that the sequences took on him, and how he had to improvise on the spot to get the job done despite having burned his skin and dislocated his shoulder.
Discussing the climax, he said in Hindi, “Before the Guliga sequence, there is a fire sequence. People hit me with a fire stick. I had scratches all over my back. My skin got scratched and burnt, there were blisters everywhere. If we had tried to do it with VFX or used a body double, it would not have looked real. Nor did we have the time. I was also losing patience. I was so angry. If someone would’ve tried to annoy me then, I would’ve killed them. I was that ferocious. You will get a sense of that in the film. It’s real. I couldn’t sleep properly after going back home. It was so painful.”
He said that while shooting the scene, which required him to be only in a lungi, his blisters popped. But he ploughed through the pain because he was more frustrated about getting the shoot done and not wasting time.
Shetty also discussed an earlier action scene, which left him injured and doubled the film’s budget. He said, “It was a nightmare of a shoot. We exceeded our budget by 100% in just seven days. My shoulder got dislocated too during this scene. But we just put some pain relief gel on it. We had no sense of luxury, like, ‘Oh, the lead actor is in pain, so we can call off the shoot’. I am the director; I had to finish the sequence.”
Kantara is among the top-grossing movies of 2022, and an oft-cited example of how South Indian movies have outperformed Hindi films this year. Other South Indian hits this year are RRR, Ponniyin Selvan: I, and KGF: Chapter 2.