RRR is set in Delhi in 1920 and was made in Hyderabad. The Delhi on screen was built there twice, on opposite sides of the same city: once on the floor of an industrial complex given over to film work, once on a studio lot big enough to keep a railway station standing between productions.
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places on the route
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Filming ran from November 2018 to August 2021 and most of it stayed in Telangana. It left for a town in Gujarat, a hill station in Maharashtra, a forest in Sofia, and, at the very end, Kyiv.
An aluminium plant turned over to film production. The works give their name to the colony next door, and Telugu crews take the floor space for sets and climaxes too big to build on a stage.
RRR started here. Sets went up inside the complex and the first schedule was shot on them, about twenty days from 19 November 2018, with both leads working. The production would come back to Hyderabad over and over for the next three years, but this was day one.
Guinness recorded it in 2005 as the largest film studio complex in the world. It is a working studio and a holiday destination on the same ground: sound stages and standing sets behind the gate, and in front of them an amusement park, six hotels, vintage buses, a Rajasthan palace, a Mughal garden, an England street and a Hollywood sign on the hill. Sets built for hits are not always struck. The Mahishmati sets from Baahubali are part of the tour.
The lot is where the film industry of the south goes for scale, and it takes visitors from elsewhere too. Rajamouli built both Baahubali pictures here, in 2015 and 2017, and came back for this one. Shah Rukh Khan shot Chennai Express and Dilwale on the lot. Salman Khan was here for Tere Naam in 2003 and Wanted in 2009, and Hrithik Roshan for Krrish 3, on the studio's Mumbai street.
RRR took a long schedule here in the second half of 2019, after the unit came back from Bulgaria. The cinematographer names the lot as one of three Hyderabad addresses where the film's sets stood; the Delhi of the story was built in this city, not shot in the real one.
around the Osman Sagar reservoir, on the south-west edge of Hyderabad
The third of the Hyderabad addresses, and the one that was on location rather than on a lot. Gandipet is the country around Osman Sagar, a reservoir with a stone viewing terrace built on top of a boulder above the water. The city has caught up with it: from one hillside you get village roofs and a white mosque in front, and the towers of the new financial district in the haze behind.
Sets were built on location here. What they were, the crew has not said.
A trading community built its own Paris here and stopped. From the 1820s to the 1930s the Dawoodi Bohras of Siddhpur raised streets of timber mansions with stuccoed fronts, ornate pilasters, trellised balconies and gabled roofs, painted pink, lilac, lime green and peach, each facade carrying a monogram of its owner's initials in Latin letters. The town is called the Paris of Gujarat for them.
Underneath is an older Siddhpur. Mularaja began the Rudra Mahalaya temple in 943, Jayasimha Siddharaja consecrated it around 1140, made the town his capital and renamed it after himself, and an army sent by Alauddin Khalji pulled it down in 1298. The ruins and the Jami Masjid are both protected monuments. Bindu Sarovar, a square tank with steps down to the water, is one of the five lakes named in the Bhagavata Purana and the tank people travel to for the shraddha rite for a mother.
The film came for the town as it stands. The cinematographer calls it a place preserved in time and names no scene.
A plateau of about 150 square kilometres with valleys on every side, reaching 1,439 m at Wilson Point. The British turned it into a hill station and the summer capital of the Bombay Presidency. The Krishna rises here, with the Koyna, the Venna and the Gayatri. The climate suits strawberries, which is why the town grows most of India's crop and holds a geographical indication for them since 2010, and the same climate delivers 100 to 200 mm of rain a day for a week and a half in July.
The unit came in early December 2020 for what the producers announced as a very short schedule in and around the town, with both leads. They did not say what for.
The Bulgarian schedule ran about a month from late August 2019 and was set up around Rama Rao's half of the story. The cinematographer places the work in a forest in Sofia. Which forest, we could not establish.
The leg was run on the Bulgarian side by Todor Lazarov, who joined as a horsemaster for one scene and finished it as action cameraman and producer of the Bulgarian shoot.
Kyiv
In the summer of 2021 the ceremonial residence of the president of Ukraine was let to an Indian film crew for the best part of a fortnight. They put several hundred extras in period dress on the forecourt, brought in an orchestra, and shot a dance contest. Six months later Russia invaded.
A Telugu-language epic about the Raj ended up in Kyiv for bureaucratic reasons rather than romantic ones. The picture had scenes left unfinished by the pandemic and needed somewhere outside the European Union to finish them, because the restrictions inside it were tight and the British members of the cast were contractually unable to fly to India. Serbia and Georgia were also looked at. The Ukrainian end was handled by 435 Films, whose founder Anna Palenchuk has given the fullest account of what happened; her company had worked on seven Indian productions before this one and had a long-standing relationship with the Indian location scout Ramji Natarajan.
Elizabeth of Russia ordered it in 1744 and never saw it finished. Rastrelli drew it, his student Ivan Michurin and a group of other architects completed it in 1752, and Catherine II was the first senior member of the imperial family to stay in it, in 1787. Fires gutted the place in the early nineteenth century and it stood abandoned for close to fifty years. Alexander II had it rebuilt in 1870 from old drawings and watercolours, by the architect Konstantin Mayevsky, and renamed it after his wife, Maria Alexandrovna, who asked for the park that still runs off the south side.
Since then it has been a revolutionary committee headquarters, an agricultural school, a museum, a bomb-damaged shell restored at the end of the 1940s, and a building site again from 2007. It is the official residence of the president, standing next to the Verkhovna Rada, and the room where visiting heads of state are received is the White Hall, which Volodymyr Zelenskyy renamed the White Hall of Heroes of Ukraine in April 2022.
In August 2021 the dance from "Naatu Naatu" was staged in front of it. In the film the ground is a formal British party in Delhi in 1920, at which the two heroes out-dance every Englishman present. The number sits in front of the palace rather than inside it, and what the crew brought was flowers and ribbons on the building, and steps, arbours and small lanterns built on the spot to fill out the frame. Olena Shoptenko, a world champion in Latin dance, worked as a staging choreographer on the shoot.
Getting the address took direct dealing with the President's Office. Palenchuk says the palace was held for almost two weeks and that shooting there ran about ten days. The Indian unit had flown in on two charters. At the peak there were several hundred people on the forecourt, most of them extras, with more than fifty trained dancers among them and an orchestra, everyone in period costume and heavy makeup.
S. S. Rajamouli had drawn the sequence before he had a building for it. Palenchuk's account of the recce is that he looked at the palace and said this was exactly what he had pictured.
Novi Petrivtsi, Vyshhorod Raion, about 20 km north of the city
A monastery stood here until the Bolsheviks closed it in 1923. From 1935 it was a government residence, first Soviet and then Ukrainian, and in 2007 it was privatised in Viktor Yanukovych's last weeks as prime minister. He lived there until 21 February 2014, when he left the country. What he built there is now the exhibit: the Finnish log clubhouse everyone calls Honka, a car museum of his own vehicles, a golf course, an ostrich farm, fountains and man-made lakes, all of it behind a five-metre fence with a no-fly zone over the top. Automaidan activists took charge of the estate the day the guards walked off it and turned it into a public park. It has been a museum open to visitors since the middle of November 2014.
RRR filmed here. Four separate accounts of the Ukrainian schedule name the park, including the producer's own and the state news agency's, and not one of them says which scene. We have not found a source that does.
The estate has been rented to film crews before. Zelenskyy's comedy series Servant of the People, in which he plays a schoolteacher who accidentally becomes president, shot at Mezhyhirya in 2015, along with tower-block courtyards, shopping centres and the old exhibition grounds. In September 2017 the Ukrainian war drama Kruty 1918 started shooting here, using the grounds for the film's French locations.
Victoria Film Studios
The studio gate at Hurivshchyna, September 2019. The entrance is built as a castle.
Hurivshchyna, Dmytrivka hromada, Bucha Raion, off the Zhytomyr highway about 30 km west of Kyiv
The gate is built as a castle, turrets and a spire, with stylised sculptures out of Alien and Predator set into the entrance. It stands on a village road with fields opposite. Behind it are thirty-six hectares: ten stages, the largest of them 2,500 square metres, and six outdoor sets of about a hectare each that go by the names Village, Old Town, Prison, Lake, River and Field. There are no tours. The gatehouse is what a visitor gets to see, and from across the fields it reads as a small grey castle in front of a row of long pale sheds.
This is where the parts of RRR that India could not finish were finished. Palenchuk says huge outdoor sets were put up on the lot reproducing what had already been built at Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad, and that the English members of the cast came to Ukraine for those scenes. The production could have rebuilt the palace at Ramoji as well. It came to Kyiv instead and used the real one.
