Adipurush: Director Om Raut reveals how he was inspired to adapt Ramayana for Prabhas’ film

The current year is shaping up to be quite a good one for cinephiles, with many highly anticipated titles across languages gearing up to hit screens. One among them is definitely Prabhas’ much-hyped mythological epic, Adipurush, helmed by Om Raut. The filmmaker recently opened up about the film and what inspired him to adapt the Indian epic Ramayana onto the big screen.

In a conversation with Variety, the filmmaker revealed that the idea for the film emerged at the 2000 Mumbai Film Festival, when he watched the Japanese film, The Prince of Light, an anime adaptation of the Ramayana by Yugo Sako. Raut reminisced about how he was ‘mesmerised’ by the film, and how he was marvelled by its simple and concise storytelling, which made it easy for people to understand and fall in love with the characters.

He wondered if foreigners could weave such a beautiful and interesting piece out of it, why can’t the Indians? Thus started his journey of telling the Ramayana in his own way. Although the idea took form years ago, it wasn’t until the pandemic-induced lockdown that Raut had seriously started working on it, and rewrote the script he did earlier.

In the upcoming film, Prabhas plays the titular protagonist, Raghav, another name for Rama. The story is set 7,000 years ago and Raut said he used modern storytelling techniques to tell the story. The upcoming film also stars Kriti Sanon and Saif Ali Khan, who play Janaki and Lankesh respectively. The film was initially slated to release on August 11 this year, but its release date has been shifted to make way for Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha . The new release date is yet to be announced.