Rana Daggubati hopes more underwater war films will be made in India

Pic Courtesy: Movie Still

Mumbai: Rana Daggubati hopes that "The Ghazi Attack", said to be the first ever Indian film to be based on underwater war, will pave way to more such movies in the future.

According to Rana, "The Ghazi Attack", which is India's first underwater war-at-sea film, will push other filmmakers to explore this genre.

"When 'Baahubali' happened, there was never a war film made in decades. Then we had two films that came, in one film 'Rudramadevi' I did a cameo, and other was 'Gautamiputra Satakarni'. It's important that somebody breaks that ice and it's important to break it correctly," Rana told PTI.

The actor worked very hard to put everything aesthetically correct in "The Ghazi Attack".
"With this film we knew it's the first underwater war film we were making. We had to make it aesthetically correct as we did not had a reference point," he said.

Not many are aware about the underwater tale of courage and patriotism of the men aboard Indian Submarine S-21 who destroyed the Pakistani submarine PNS Ghazi when it ventured into Indian waters to destroy the INS Vikrant.

"We consulted so many Navy people before we started shooting. It's the film that glorifies the Navy, giving them the due credit. It's a big incident that has happened in 1971 before the war," the Telugu star said.

"It's the first Naval submarine-based film in this country, the West has made so many films like that. We have the fourth largest Navy in the world and we don't have a film on the Navy which is quite surprising. We were happy to make one," he said.

Another challenge for the "Dum Maro Dum" actor was to get the VFX and CG (computer graphics) correct in the film so that the underwater action sequences look real.

"As nobody had done submarine water texturing before in India, it took time for us to work on it. Finally we have got a decent product (referring to film). Many people who have seen the film are happy and they did not expect this kind of visual effects," he said.

The film is up for release on February 17 and the makers launched the trailer on January 11. The "Baahubali" actor took time to release the first look of "The Gazi Attack" as he wanted everything to be in place.

"We were sure we did not want the look of the film to come out till the time we were confident and ready. We finished the film in mid-March (last year), by the time I saw the copy it was January. So it took a long time to get everything correctly," he said.

Also featuring Taapsee Pannu, Kay Kay Menon and Atul Kulkarni in the lead, the film has been made simultaneously in Hindi and Telugu and will be dubbed in Tamil.