Fifteen years after Ra.One arrived as Hindi cinema’s attempt at a homegrown science-fiction superhero spectacle, Anubhav Sinha is still answering for it. In a conversation with The Times of India, the director returns to the film’s origins, its visual bets, and the place it occupies on his office wall.
What emerges is a director making peace with a production he does not fully defend on every frame, but remains emotionally attached to.
The idea started with a father, not a superhero
Sinha’s original premise, as he recounts it, was a meek video-game developer who builds a game for his son. The boy wants a powerful villain; the villain escapes the game and kills the father, who has quietly modelled the hero on himself. The hero then has to be brought out to take the villain back in.
He thought of Shah Rukh Khan immediately. The star’s early interest in gaming and technology made him the natural fit. When Sinha narrated the idea, Shah Rukh asked when he wanted to make it. “If you say yes today, two years later,” Sinha replied. He later learned that line sealed the meeting.
What still holds up, and where the grip slipped
Sinha’s assessment is unusually precise. “I would say 60 to 70 per cent of the VFX is fantastic,” he said. The problem, as he sees it, was not the technology but the control around it.
- The film’s scale and Shah Rukh’s star power were, in his words, beyond his means at the time.
- He cites the Rajinikanth appearance as a moment where the grip slipped, driven by enthusiasm more than narrative need.
- Shah Rukh once chided him gently: “Why do you keep thinking about money all the time?” — evidence, Sinha says, of how freely the star gave to the film.
He does not pretend the result was flawless. With distance, he says, an artist finds problems in most of his work; Thappad is the one film he still finds as dear as the day it released because it is “about something that is perceived as nothing.”
Why the film still matters to the record
For Hindi cinema, Ra.One remains a reference point for what an Indian studio could attempt with visual effects at that moment. Produced by Gauri Khan under Red Chillies Entertainment, it was one of the most ambitious VFX-driven films of its time. Even today, Sinha’s comment sections fill with demands for Ra.One 2 when he posts about the film.
But a sequel is not on his table. He and Shah Rukh, he says, don’t talk about films, and the star’s current action phase is not one Sinha considers himself cut out for. “Money thinks it has found a formula,” he said, adding that the business keeps backing that formula even when it fails.
The aftertaste is still warm
In his office, Sinha keeps a wall of stills from films whose actors he feels obliged to because they chose to work with him. Ra.One is the centrepiece. That position, he says, is not because of Shah Rukh Khan, even as he adds: “I genuinely feel indebted to Shah Rukh Khan.”
Some younger audiences, he notes, don’t connect him to Ra.One; they know him for Article 15. Then they ask him to make another one. He knows what that means.
Source: The Times of India
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