Rana Daggubati: In all of the industries that will get back, probably Malayalam industry can get back much faster!

MUMBAI: The third session of Naik Naik & Company’s web series with the theme ‘Reinvent and Rediscover – Talent and Talent Managers perspective’ turned out to be quite interesting and informative, with the support of all the esteemed panelists including actors Rana Daggubati, Huma Qureshi, Jackky Bhagnani, filmmakers Sanjay Gupta and Madhur Bhandarkar, Vijay Subramanium (Co-Founder & CEO Kwan Talent Management Agency Pvt Ltd), Caleb Franklin (Founder & Managing Partner, Matter Advisors) and Gunjan Arya (Ceo – Only Much Louder) making it an engaging affair. 

Shedding some light on the future of the entertainment industry in terms of its revival and the society being adaptable to the new change, Rana Daggubati said, “Human beings will adapt to the change very soon and that applies to actors as well. If there’s only one particular way things are done, then that’s the only way they will be done.”

Rana further goes on to add, “I speak from Hyderabad and I speak from a different movie industry as compared to Hindi cinema where rules are slightly different. In all of the industries that will get back, probably Malayalam industry can get back much faster than all of us because they use the smallest units and so they can get cinema done very quickly. They have very limited resources and they have made big cinema with that. It’s not very hard to adapt to the change of working with minimum resources and I’m sure that other industries too will adapt to this change very fast.” 

Huma Qureshi revealed that the lockdown is a great time for content developers, whether it is a long or short format, as it all depends on the writing aspect. “I’ve had a very interesting conversation with a writer friend of mine as to what people are interested in watching these days, like something gritty or hard-hitting maybe… but everybody in the room was of the opinion that people want to see something lighter, as there is so much of moroseness and death reports due to Covid 19 and what not. But then I saw Paatal Lok and it just blew me away. It’s really good quality writing and really good content. So again, these are presumptions that we go by, as people keep saying, ‘abhi to yeh chalne wala hai’. We have to be open to the new world and new challenges and have to be adaptable to what it is going to be.”

Sharing his view on theatre and OTT mediums, filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar said, “I have made the kind of content that OTT is making now ever since 2001 when I started making films. But yes, the content narrative has changed drastically over the last few years with the advent of OTT. There seem to be a paradigm shift post Covid and the whole thing of the entourage, marketing has to be reassessed. Talent will always be there and cinema also will always be there. But at the same time, OTT has given a good break to the talent, in terms of writing, actors, directors and everybody. Both cinema and OTT are going to co-exist together and they would have a good dream run.”   

Naik Naik and Company in association with Pinkvilla has conducted Live sessions on Facebook. The three-day initiative (15-17 May, 2020) aims to bring together celebrities and influencers from across the Media and Entertainment industry to share their thoughts on how to plan the future post COVID 19.