Getting the script right is half the battle won

His last film, ‘Cinema Choopistha Mava’ was a big success and catapulted him to the big league, but filmmaker Trinadh Rao Nakkina says he bagged ‘Nenu Local’ much before the release of Raj Tarun-starrer. “The success of ‘Cinema Choopistha Mava’ had nothing to do with me bagging ‘Nenu Local’. I got the project from Dil Raju much before.

Prasanna (story writer) came up with an interesting line, and later we approached Nani, and he agreed instantly. We invested one year on the script– rewriting and fine-tuning it on a regular basis,” recounts Trinadh Rao.

‘Nenu Local’ garnered a lot of curiosity, thanks to the interesting title and tag line (attitude is everything). “People might assume it as a mass film because of the title, but it is not. The only mass element lies in the hero’s attitude, which we only tried to bring out in the right emotion. It is a characterisation-driven love story. It isn’t a campus-based love story either, but there’s an interesting episode of it.

The focus was more on entertaining the audience through protagonist’s witty antics and humour,” he shares, adding the film is what transpires when a Malakpet sub-inspector (played by Naveen Chandra) and an MBA student (Nani) from the same locality fall for the same girl (Keerthy Suresh).

Nani is set for a double hat-trick with ‘Nenu Local’; did that put any extra pressure on him? “Nothing as such as our sole focus was on translating on what we wrote on paper. I believe if you get the script right, half the battle is won,” he reveals his mantra.

Did working with a hero like Nani change his style of filmmaking? “You can’t deal a script that stars Raj Tarun the way you deal with Nani. Simple. Both are different heroes and have different body languages, so I made a few adjustments only in script based on the hero’s image, and not in my style.

But I am learning with every film, and that has helped me to transform into a better filmmaker,” he says, adding, “With ‘Nenu Local,’ I learnt how to customise scripts and make improvisations. There were a few situations where Nani and Devi Sri Prasad made some enhancements to the script and I felt like, ‘Why did not I come across such an idea’? So that was a learning experience.”