Aditya talks Ashwatthama

Uri: The Surgical Strike director Aditya Dhar, who turned 37 on 12 March, is all set to embark on a new epic journey. After reinventing the war genre in Uri, he is all set to re-define the super-hero genre in The Immortal Ashwatthama.

Sharing details on the project — based on the heroic character from the Mahabharata — Aditya says, “It would be a story told in three full-length parts. Yes, three separate feature films. The story demands and justifies a trilogy and that’s how we’re working on it.”

This means Ashwatthama will take at least three years of the filmmaker’s life. When asked if he’d get tired of making three films on the same subject for three years, he retorts, “Not at all. If you look at the Avengers superhero series, we have directors working for years on the same subject. The time taken to make a film should not be defined relatively. Just because Uri took a year, doesn’t mean my other films cannot take more or less time.”

Starring Uri frontman Vicky Kaushal, the threepart saga will be shot in exotic locations all over the world. And going by the director’s vision, it just may be the most expensive film to be ever produced in India. “We have scouted all over the world for locations and we’ve zeroed in on Greenland, New Zealand, Namibia, and Tokyo. As for Ashwatthama being the most expensive film ever, don’t be too sure of that. When audiences saw Uri, they said it looked like a very expensive war film. But the fact is, I had not spent even half of what people imagined the budget to be. The same would be true of Ashwatthama. It would look like a far more costly film than the actual budget. I’m from the middle class. I know how to economise,” he laughs.

The film starts shooting in mid-2020, “but now with coronavirus (outbreak), we don’t really know when things will normalise. What I do know is that we want The Immortal Ashwatthama to give Indian cinema the same global attention, recognition, and respectability as Korean cinema has got from Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.”