Sep 22, 2026 8:00pm IST
‘Ramayana’ DoP Pankaj Kumar on Executing A Complex Scene in Ranbir Kapoor, Yash-starrer That Took 50 Rehearsal Takes (EXCLUSIVE)
“Ramayana,” headlined by Ranbir Kapoor, Yash and Sai Pallavi, is currently one of the most awaited projects among cinegoers across the country. Ever since its inception, the makers have left no stone unturned to make it a global spectacle through its marketing strategies.
As the epic is set to hit the screens during the Diwali weekend, the DoP of the movie speaks about his visual grammar, executing the toughest scene and India’s IMAX future in an exclusive interview with Variety India.
As a DoP, how would you describe your visual grammar?
My visual grammar is that I keep it very simple. I get into the intensity and the depth of the script and the text itself and then I imagine a visual world. I like my images to have depth and don't want them just to be at a shallow surface, just conveying information. I like to have my images to have emotional depth. So, my style keeps changing with every film. I don't have any fixed style of looking at it deliberately, because I don't think I should look at every narrative with the same lens. So with every story, I try to imagine a different way of, or a particular way of looking at that world, at the characters, you know, how we create the imagery. So yes, I try to imagine the narrative in my head and go with what feels right.
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Was there any particular scene in ‘Ramayana’ that was tough for you to execute?
Yes! There are many sequences actually, in the film. What happens is, when you're sitting in the virtual environment and you let your imagination go wild, you have the luxury of time that you do not get on the floor. So, you try all kinds of different kinds of camera movements and you have time to imagine and try out different things in the scene and making it more and more challenging because it looks very exciting on screen. So, it happened with many of the sequences that started out very simple. But as we went along, trying to play the camera down, I just kept getting more ambitious at the previous stage itself. And many times, I would think, ‘Oh my God, I'm designing all these camera moves. How am I going to achieve it on a live shoot?’ But then again, just because we have pre-visualized it, we get enough time to plan it. Then I would get the right grip equipment. My team would be given exact instructions. They would be able to see exactly what they need to do and achieve. So, we would figure out, get all our machineries together and put the thing together. And it was very satisfying to see all those moves that we had planned actually working out.
There are many exciting scenes like that in the film. In one of the sequences, the camera was flying on a techno crane from a great height and while it was moving very fast, one of my camera operators had to run and detach the gimbal from the techno crane and run along circular and go very close to the actor. It was a very complicated shot. It took us around 50 takes of rehearsals to get it exactly how we had pre-visualized it. And there are other sequences like that, where the camera flies from a long distance and goes very close to the actor and it's not going in a straight line, so even the cable camera rig was very, very complicated. So, there are many exciting sequences like that.
It took a lot of teamwork and that's when you need a great team to execute your vision. That's how this film gave me exposure to the kind of things, equipment and technology that we normally don't get. Because of its huge budget, it provided us with resources that are inaccessible to most of the films.
Since ‘Ramayana’ will also release in IMAX screens, do you think Indian cinema is well equipped for the IMAX format?
Absolutely. The IMAX format has nothing to do with which nation it belongs to. It depends on what kind of stories you want to depict. Now, when you say the IMAX format, we always mean big-screen images that are worthy of being on the big screen. It's the nature of storytelling that lends itself to this format very well. I personally love the IMAX format. I love the experience of watching films on the big screen. Only a few films are worthy of being watched on a big screen. I mean, they're framed like that.
I would love to see hundreds of IMAX theaters all over the country. And I would love filmmakers to come up with more epic stories and spectacle cinema that can be enjoyed only on big screen. India is ready for it.We are the country that makes the maximum number of films in the world. Why shouldn't we have the maximum number of IMAX screens in the world?
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