The RRR Filmmakers Used 'Small Robotic Cars' As Stand-Ins For CGI Animals During The Epic Fight Scene [Exclusive]

We're entering awards season, a time when studios compete to release all their Oscar-bait movies, the films that are often prestige character dramas and/or historical period pieces that have "something to say," lavish sets and costumes, nuanced acting, and intimate stories.

We don't necessarily need those films, however, because we have movies like "RRR," a feature that can send a shock through the Hollywood awards system by being one of the best movie-watching experiences you can have this year. There are no small performances in the movie, no subtext, and no attempt at historical accuracy. That's because filmmaker S.S. Rajamouli aims for maximum entertainment and delivers a film that delivers on all cylinders by taking the best lesson from Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" — create a revisionist historical four-quadrant crowd-pleasing blockbuster. Who needs subtext when you literally end the climax with a shot of the words, "The sun never sets on the British Empire," stained with the blood of a British governor executed with his own rifle? Who needs a serious character drama when you can have two dudes engage in the absolute biggest bromance? And who needs a quiet, minimalistic score when you can have a soundtrack full of bangers that you can listen to on repeat for days on end? 

"RRR" is a miracle of a movie, a project that should not exist that's made by people who should not be alive, if only judging by the complexity of the action scenes. Take the incredible introduction of Ram Charan Teja near the beginning of the film, where he defeats hundreds upon hundreds in a chaotic fight, for example. Or arguably the most impressive and cuckoo-bananas scene in the entire movie — the epic fight where N.T. Rama Rao Jr.'s Bheem releases all the animals on the unsuspecting British.

During a climax of the film (not the climax, mind you, because the movie packs about three movies' worth of stories and climaxes into one 3-hour-long epic), the plan to rescue a little girl who is held captive by the British comes to a head, and Bheem and his conspirators unleash a truck full of wild animals. The result is a cacophony of cuts, claws, and hooves, as growls, roars, and screams fill what was supposed to be a stupid party to celebrate some colonizer guy's promotion. The scene works because it plays with the racist and imperialistic ideas of the colonized being less civilized  — that India is just a jungle — by having literal animals annihilate the dudes with the guns.

It is a phenomenal scene with many moving parts that still remains easy to follow. When /Film's Ryan Scott spoke with cinematographer KK Senthil Kumar, he told us the secrets to making the incredible manor fight feel real (and very violent):

"When the animals are let loose, so there's lots of chaos which is happening and the animals are running between the crowd. Now we need to get the characters to look at the animal, and how they're going to support that, we used a robotic car, small robotic cars, which we placed the figures of animals on it, and it is going between the crowd for the people to understand, a tiger is going up. There's a deer running behind, or a wolf going there."

It makes total sense that a movie as metal as "RRR" would swap the typical tennis ball on a stick associated with CGI creations in Hollywood with robot cars moving around the set. According to KK Senthil Kumar:

"That is for them to react and other things. So those kind of things were done. Also when the tiger is jumping over a beam before he throws the leopard. So we placed a big LED strip to see the one red light would pass. So for me, as a cinematographer, that is a cue of where the head of the tiger is. So I need to follow it, kind of a thing. Lots of experimentation was done before finally sending it to CGI and fulfilling it."

Now, imagine watching the scene being shot. Because this sounds like a Disneyland electric parade but with a lot more dead people, a sort of period piece "Mad Max: Fury Road," and that sounds amazing.