Director Shashank ensured that his film Krishna Leela created a buzz in the industry with its audio tracks even as he remained tight-lipped about the film’s details. He roped in Puneeth and Upendra to sing two songs for the films and the strategy clicked well. The resulting euphoria has continued and the audience is now looking forward to the movie which will hit the screens this Ugadi. In a conversation with City Express, the director revealed aspects of the storyline.
“I have always focussed on human relationships in my films. In Krishna-Leela too, it is the same, but this time, along with the hero, heroine and supporting cast, the central characters include a Sim card and a mobile phone,” he says.
According to the director, the highlight of Krishna Leela is a real life incident which occurred in 2010 in Bengaluru and which was widely broadcast on various news channels. “Though it was a serious incident, there was a certain beauty in it. The manner in which a boy and a girl get stuck in an awkward situation only because of talking over the phone was interesting. For the two people in question, it was intense but for people who watched it, it was entertainment,” he says.
The director took the incident to the next level in 2013 when he decided to convert it into a script. Interestingly, Shashank reveals that he had to make several visits to the police station before he could bring out a bound script. “After three years of the incident, I decided to make the film for Ajai Rao under his Krishna Productions banner. As I started digging for more details, I realised that I was familiar with only half of the incident as it was depicted on the news. Since the case landed up with the police, I tried to get more details of the two people involved to try and understand how their life had changed after the incident. Though I tried to reach the duo directly, I could not get access to them. However, after much scouting, I got to know about exactly how it turned out for the two of them,” he says.
According to Shashank, it was during his visits to the police station that he was able to capture the entire mood of the events and the police’s handling of such situations. “The police have a different way to deal with cases involving love affairs. I wanted to understand the treatment and have adapted the same throughout the narration of the film,” says the director who usually makes romantic films. “Basically, I am a very emotional person. Even though I am a director, I still cry when I watch an emotional scene because it is in my nature. I want to know more about people, society, human relationships, and incidents and that has been my personal interest since childhood. Since I connect with real life people, I watch the news to get inspiration for my cinema and that is why even the characterisation in my films becomes very strong,” he states.
Shashank clarifies that the story and characters of Krishna Leela were formed based on the reportage and from his own research. “Just because I entered a police station to find out more about the case, it doesn’t mean that Krishna Leela is about crime. The film is about the domestic problems of middle-class families woven around the theme of love,” Shashank says.
Apart from Ajai Rao, Mayuri, Rangayana Raghu, Achyut Rao and Dharmendra Urs form the rest of the cast.