Much of RRR is set in Delhi in 1920. Most of it was shot in Hyderabad, on sets built at opposite ends of that city, about 40 km apart: on the floor of an aluminium works given over to film production, and on a studio lot big enough to keep a railway station standing between productions.
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Filming ran from November 2018 to August 2021 and most of it stayed in Telangana. It also went to Gujarat — Siddhpur, and ten days in Vadodara in March 2019 — to a hill station in Maharashtra, to a forest in Sofia, and, at the very end, to Kyiv. News18 counted the Netherlands among the film's overseas locations too.
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Serilingampally, on the western edge of Hyderabad
An aluminium plant turned over to film production. The works give their name to the colony next door.
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.
east of Hyderabad, off the Vijayawada highway
Guinness recorded it in 2005 as the largest film studio complex in the world, 47 sound stages on 674 hectares. It is a working studio and a holiday destination on the same ground. A forty-foot sign reading RAMOJI FILM CITY in Hollywood lettering greets you at the entrance; behind the gate there are six hotels, tour buses, a Rajasthan palace, a Mughal garden and an England street. 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 crew came back from Bulgaria. The sets for the Delhi of the story stood on this lot and at the aluminium works: most of the film was shot in Hyderabad, the cinematographer says, and not in the city the story is set in.
around the Osman Sagar reservoir, west of Hyderabad
Work here was on location rather than on a lot. Gandipet is the country around Osman Sagar, the reservoir dammed across the Musi under the last Nizam after the flood of 1908 killed about fifteen thousand people in Hyderabad — drinking water and flood defence in one. It opened in May 1921 and the city water board still runs it. Sagar Mahal, the Nizam's summer guest house above the water, is a heritage building now with a state tourism resort inside it.
Sets were built on location here. What they were, the crew has not said.
Patan district, on the Saraswati
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 1298–99. 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.
Satara district, in the Western Ghats
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 ten to twelve days of continuous rain in July, 100 to 200 mm on each of them.
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.
The Bulgarian schedule opened in 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.
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.
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 because of what that scene needed: a crowd of foreign faces. Getting that many foreigners into India was too difficult under the Covid rules, the cinematographer says, and Ukraine was one of the first countries to reopen for filming; the dancers were found there. The producer's account adds the rest of it — scenes the pandemic had left unfinished, and somewhere outside the European Union to shoot them, because the restrictions inside it were tight. Serbia and Georgia were also looked at. The Ukrainian end was handled by 435 Films, whose founder Anna Palenchuk had worked on seven Indian productions before this one and has worked for years with the Indian location scout Ramji Natarajan.
5A Mykhaila Hrushevskoho Street, Pechersk
Elizabeth of Russia chose the ground on a visit to Kyiv in 1744 and ordered a palace to Rastrelli's design. His student Ivan Michurin and a group of other architects finished the building, and she never stayed in it: the first of the imperial family to sleep there was Catherine II, 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 from old drawings and watercolours, work that ran to 1870 under the architect Karl Maievskyi, and it carries the name of the emperor's 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. The Indian unit had flown in on two charters. More than fifty trained dancers worked the forecourt with an orchestra behind them, everyone in period dress: bulky costumes that had to survive the rhythm, and the particular makeup those costumes needed.
S. S. Rajamouli had the sequence in his head 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 July 2007 a government order signed by Viktor Yanukovych as prime minister moved the residence and 137 hectares out of state ownership. He lived there until the night of 21 February 2014, when he left Kyiv for Kharkiv; by the end of that month he was holding a press conference in Rostov-on-Don. What he built 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.
The RRR unit worked here in the summer of 2021.
The estate has been rented to film crews before. Zelenskyy's comedy series Servant of the People, in which he plays a school history teacher whose rant about corruption is filmed by a pupil and carries him to the presidency, 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.
Hurivshchyna, Dmytrivka hromada, Bucha Raion, off the Zhytomyr highway about 30 km west of Kyiv
The gate is built as a castle of stone, wood and metal, its outline taken from the one in the Walt Disney logo. A metal Alien and a Predator stand at the entrance, Batman is on the wall, and the Iron Throne sits out front. The castle is 850 m off the highway, on a village road. Behind it are more than thirty-six hectares: ten stages, one of them 2,500 square metres, and six outdoor sets of more than 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.
This is where the parts of RRR that India could not finish were finished. Palenchuk says huge outdoor sets went up on the lot, reproducing what had already been built in India, and that the English members of the cast came to Ukraine for those scenes. The palace they could have built too, she says, on their own lot at Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad. They came to Kyiv instead and used the real one.