Six and a half years to create a single action sequence! That is the amount of time filmmaker Nitesh Tiwari and his team spent bringing the epic battle between Ravana and Jatayu to life in ‘Ramayana‘. With the ambitious mythological film taking shape over several years, the director has now offered a glimpse into the extensive work that went into designing some of its most elaborate sequences.One of the significant moments in the epic is the confrontation between Ravana and Jatayu. While the battle is an important part of the Ramayana, recreating it for the big screen turned out to be a massive undertaking. Nitesh revealed that the sequence alone took six and a half years to complete, involving thousands of artists and technicians.Talking about the scale of the work, the director said, “You know how much time it has taken for us to finish the Ravana and Jatayu fight? From the time I briefed the previous artist to the time we finished the whole thing, six and a half years. One action sequence. I can go on and on about it for an hour just to tell you how much effort went into making everything from scratch. And thousands of people have worked on it,” he said in an interview with Shreyas Media.The director also shared that the time-consuming process was not limited to the action sequence. The design of Ravana’s iconic Pushpak Viman, the flying vehicle featured in the epic, took the team nearly two years to finalise. The artists reportedly explored around 40 to 50 designs before arriving at the version that features in the film.Interestingly, the final design was quite different from the team’s original vision. Since the Ravana-Jatayu battle had initially been conceptualised around an earlier version of the flying vehicle, the filmmakers had to revisit and rework several aspects of the sequence after settling on its final appearance.Explaining the creative process, Nitesh said, “We took close to two years to arrive at that. And then a lot of things changed, which is why it took us so long to shape the Ravana and Jatayu fight. Because previously, we assumed the design of Pushpak Viman would be something like that, and we shaped the sequence around it. And when we loved the final design, which was completely different from what we had first thought, we had to do a lot of iterations. We created some 40-50 designs for Pushpak Viman before finalising the one you see in the film. We didn’t want something that did look like it could fly; we wanted some kind of science to go into it. Because I believe, we all believe there was science behind everything that happened that time,” the director explained.
