Rana Daggubati and Taapsee Pannu starrer ‘The Ghazi Attack’ hit the theatres today. The film is based on the mysterious sinking of PNS Ghazi during Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. The film also stars Kay Kay Menon and Atul Kulkarni in pivotal roles and has been touted as Bollywood’s first war-at-sea film.
Recently in an exclusive interview with team Miss Kyra, we asked Rana what made him do the film and the reason behind the urge to tell the story to the world. To this Rana said, “I am a Telugu boy who I grew up in Andhra. I have been to Vizag many times. I used to go to the RK beach (Ramakrishna Mission Beach) in Vizag, which is the most popular beach in Vizag, I mean there is no way you can miss that beach. I have been seeing the submarine since I was a kid, it had been installed in the 1970s. Now we have just heard bits and pieces of the story as we went along, very few people in Vizag know it.”
He continued, “Many years later when I first met Sankalp (Reddy) and there was an idea of a submarine film being made, I just put two and two together and started getting the first idea of what the story really was. To me it felt like a very important tale because it is something that we never ever knew about, it happened before the war, it is a classified file, it is something that few people in Vizag have heard of but don’t even know of.”
He further added, “We have the fourth largest Navy in the world and we don’t have a film on it. I am a filmmaker; I am not making any historical documentary. It is a ‘first film’ experience for anybody, I mean who has ever seen a submarine in a movie before…at least in India?”So I guess all of this put together just made it an important film for me to be a part of.”
(Also read: Is Taapsee Pannu's 'Naam Shabana' based on true story?)