Kalki 2898 AD director Nag Ashwin talks about the film's box office success, criticism of its 3-hour runtime, and more
Kalki 2898 AD has been the film of the year so far. The Nag Ashwin directorial, starring Prabhas, Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Haasan, and Deepika Padukone, has found love from the audience, and galloped towards the Rs 1000-crore mark at the box office. As the film breaks one record after another, its director Nag Ashwin sat down with DNA to reflect on the success, criticisms, and the road ahead.
With a reported budget of Rs 600 crore, Kalki 2898 AD is the most expensive Indian film produced till date. Naturally, with that much capital riding on it, there was a lot at stake for director Nag Ashwin and the producers (one of whom happens to be his wife Priyanka). When asked to give his dominant emotion to the success, Ashwin says, “Relief, because all of us put a lot at stake in this film, financially, time wise, and in terms of energy.” The director adds, “Now it’s coming back in the form of box office and love from all the places. And the love is coming from places like Delhi and Punjab and small centres like Tonk in Rajasthan, which is great because we rarely expect a film to travel to very small centres in rural Rajasthan.”
While the film has been praised by fans and critics alike, Ashwin says he still feels he could have made many changes to. But clarifies that it doesn’t mean he is unhappy with the final product. Ashwin explains, “I genuinely think that for most films, specially this one, you can’t finish making it. You are never done with the film; you just run out of time and the hard drives are essentially taken from you. That’s usually what happens. For a film like this that is so complicated in every department, even if you give me a month more, I would feel I could use some more time.”
At 3 hours, Kalki 2898 AD is one of the longest Indian films of the year, and some of the criticism of it has been about this runtime. Many critics and fans have argued that editing few scenes would have made the film better. Responding to the criticism, Nag Ashwin says, “I am taking all the criticism positively because most of them are valid too. Just to understand that this was the first part and it required a setup and all the characters needed to be introduced. Somebody was comparing it to Mahanati (his previous film) but there she was one character and it was her story. If this (Kalki) was only Ashwatthama’s story, we could have done differently but here were so many major stars and big characters that needed to be intertwined. It was a tricky screenplay to get right. Maybe we could have done better but it is a learning.”
Ashwin feels that by and large, the film has been liked by people and he wants to take that message as he gets down to make the sequel in due time. “I am taking it all positively because if people feel that 6 or 7 minutes could have been edited or something of the sort, then the same people are also loving the second half or the interval and the Kurukshetra sequences. So you love 2 hour 54 minutes of it and I’ll take that,” the filmmaker says signing off.
Kalki 2898 AD is running in theatres across India.
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 "Nag Ashwin")
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