Aishwarya Rai Bachchan has resumed the shoot for filmmaker Mani Ratnam’s upcoming multilingual historical drama Ponniyin Selvan in Puducherry, sources informed Silverscreen India. Along with Rai Bachchan, actor Aishwarya Lekshmi has also joined the sets of the film.
The shoot was earlier stalled due to the ongoing pandemic.
Recently, the makers of the film announced that it will be released in two parts, with the first one out in 2022. Rai Bachchan too had taken to Instagram and shared a poster with the caption: “The Golden Era comes to Life.”
Ponniyin Selvan is being jointly produced by Mani Ratnam and Lyca Productions. Siva Ananth is the executive producer. The film has music by Ratnam’s regular composer AR Rahman.
It is based on the historical Tamil novel, Ponniyin Selvan, written by Kalki (pen name of the Tamil writer, Ramaswamy Krishnamurthy). The five-volume novel tells the story of the early days of Arulmozhivarman, who later went on to become the Chola emperor Rajaraja Chola I. It is believed that Kalki took nearly three years to complete the four-volume novel.
The screenplay of the upcoming film is by Mani Ratnam, Elango Kumaravel, and writer B Jeyamohan, who has also penned the dialogues.
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Ponniyin Selvan has an ensemble cast drawn from the Tamil and Malayalam industries, as well as from the Hindi film industry. Besides Rai Bachchan and Lekshmi, the cast also includes Prakash Raj, Vikram, Karthi, Trisha, Jayam Ravi, Sobhita Dhulipala, Prabhu, Jayaram, Lal, Sarath Kumar, Rahman, and Ashwin Kakamanu.
Interestingly, Mani Ratnam had announced plans for a film adaptation of Ponniyin Selvan with Mahesh Babu, Vijay, and Anushka Shetty in the lead, back in the early 2000s. However, the project, which was set to be Mahesh Babu’s debut film, had to be dropped due to budget issues.
The project was revived in 2019 and Ponniyin Selvan’s title poster was released in January 2020. Sreekar Prasad is handling the editing, while Thota Tharani is in charge of production design.
A major portion of the film’s first schedule was shot in Thailand. Ravi Varman is the film’s cinematographer.
After wrapping up in Puducherry, the team is expected to head to Hyderabad for the next schedule.