HYDERABAD : After playing the prodigal younger brother in the 2023 Sriwass directorial Rama Banam, where he shared screen space with the likes of Jagapathi Babu, Khushbu Sundar and Dimple Hayathi, Gopichand is back to the theatres with an action entertainer Bhimaa. Written and directed by A Harsha, Bhimaa features Gopichand in two distinct roles, one of which sees him donning the khaki uniform. Unfazed by the failure of his last film, the actor delves into a candid chat on Bhimaa, his career choices and his opinions on writing and cinema.
Selected Excerpts
How did Bhimaa come your way?
I was introduced to Harsha through Sridhar, one of the film’s co-producers and a mutual acquaintance. He pitched me a story during COVID, which I did not connect with. I asked him if he had any police stories. He took eight months, following which he narrated Bhimaa, and here we are! I like how the film puts a police protagonist in a world with mythological/fantasy elements. The film is a well-packaged commercial entertainer with a protagonist I found myself relating to.
You have played police officers in various films over the years. How is your role in Bhimaa different than the cops you have previously portrayed?
Golimaar (2010) and Souryam ( 2008) are completely different films. Even Andhrudu (2005), where I played a police officer, is mostly a love story. Bhimaa is a complete cop story. The semi-fantasy element also provides novelty to the film. The film also does not have a conventional antagonist, which sets it apart from the police films you usually see.
People have been comparing Bhimaa to Akhanda (2021) ever since the trailer came out. Did you feel the same when you were narrated the story?
Well, isn’t it nice to be compared to a very successful film? (laughs). I think comparisons are being made because of similarities in the background score and the colour palette. But rest assured, it is a very different film, set in a town called Parusuramakshetram.
Pan-India films seem to be all the rage now, with people no longer looking at commercial potboilers the same way. There is an expectation, for everything to be larger-than-life in its scale and treatment…
A larger-than-life treatment alone cannot make or break a film. People don’t go to watch spectacle, they go to feel and witness certain emotions. Scale and production value can only amplify a film’s emotional quotient. At the end of the day, it is all about emotions.
But the audience’s tastes seem to have evolved. Commercial films are not working out as well as they used to…
Commercial films will never get overdated. They are a part and parcel of Telugu cinema. Treatment is very important. We need to find newer, more interesting ways of telling a story each time. It is also important to upgrade stories to the age they are living in. Rama Banam is a very old story, period. We failed to present it in a different, better way, and that reflected in the way the film performed at the box office.
People don’t seem to make the kind of films your father (Late T Krishna) used to direct in the 80s. What do you think has changed?
There could be many reasons, but I believe that filmmakers in the past understood society better. They observed the problems in our society very astutely and based their stories on the close associations they had with people. Filmmakers today, however, write their stories based on the films they are watching. Their sensibilities are not shaped by real-time interactions. Of course, one must also have the skill to give real-life events a cinematic structure. People who can observe people and convert their stories into cinema will always do well.
Do you feel that a lot of actors are struggling to make sense of their brand in an era where every Telugu actor is judged based on how they fare in a pan-India market?
Good films become pan-India successes, not the other way around. People of course try to reverse engineer success in their favour by marketing something as a pan-India film, but things don’t work that way. The ground realities of making a successful, interesting film are the same, pan-India or no pan-India.
What are your upcoming films?
I will be working next with Srinu Vaitla for Gopichand 32. We have finished 30% of the film’s shoot so far. There is also a film in the works with Radhamohan garu (Bhimaa producer), its story is currently in development.