‘Naatu Naatu’ from the Indian blockbuster ‘RRR’ won the Academy Award for Best Original Song — a first for an Indian production despite the industry’s worldwide renown for musicals.
Excerpts from the New York Times interview of the composers and choreographer of the song -
What is “naatu”?
“Naatu means raw and rustic,” the songwriter, Chandrabose said. He grew up in a small village in Telangana, a Telugu-speaking state whose capital, Hyderabad, is the home base for Tollywood. “Everything I wrote in the song is from my childhood memories of my life and my parents. That’s why I created it very fast,” he said.
Chandrabose remembered that Rajamouli had played up the positive vibe of the scene when first describing it. “Sing about yourself, your strength, your struggle, whatever you want to sing. The one thing not to write is: don’t criticize other people,” Chandrabose said Rajamouli told him.
Chandrabose said he had thought of two lines starting with “naatu naatu” on the way home from his talk with Rajamouli. Writing the lyrics took “only one hour.” The entire song production, up to the final master recording, took longer: a little under two months off and on over a two-year span.
His Telugu-language verses brim with the sunny rural imagery of banyan trees, leaping bulls and green chili peppers. “Jump until the dust rises into the air!” runs one line — which is exactly what happens in the movie, as dancers kick up clouds of dirt.
Set in 1920s colonial India, “RRR,” directed by S.S. Rajamouli, pits a tribal warrior, Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr., known as Jr. NTR), against an Indian officer for the British police, Ram (Ram Charan), who is assigned to find him. But the two become friends, and in the “Naatu Naatu” sequence, they go up against a British bully who wants to eject them from a lawn party. (Set against the pink-and-blue Mariinsky Palace, the sequence was filmed in Kyiv, Ukraine, before the Russian invasion.)
The marathon dance-off that follows has delighted hundreds of millions of YouTube viewers and millions of moviegoers.
Structurally, “Naatu Naatu” is like the movie in miniature, and that’s how Rajamouli has described the sequence, as a “story within the story.” It even has its own charming twist ending. As the British partygoers collapse one by one, Bheem and Ram are left to compete with each other. But Ram, seeing Bheem’s Anglo sweetheart cheering her beloved on, fakes a fall to let his friend win. Love and friendship triumph; who can resist?
Rajamouli conceived “Naatu Naatu” as a kind of fight sequence: a showdown between the dynamic Indian duo and the pompous colonialists, with fiery steps instead of punches. Bheem and Ram dance their hearts out, all smiles in front of admiring British ladies, which inflames that bully, Jake (Eduard Buhac), into some laughably angry dancing.
“Rajamouli told me that their styles had to match each other,” the film’s choreographer, Prem Rakshith, said. “It had to be difficult, but all the people had to do it.”
For the actual step, Rakshith chose a jiglike routine known as a hook step, with lots of switchback movements for arms and legs.
The musical number has a wild, uncontainable feel, like the film’s action scenes. (Despite the head-spinning pace and synchronization, none of the dancing was artificially sped up or digitally altered, according to the film’s editor, Sreekar Prasad.) Rakshith added colorful flourishes — a synchronized head- and foot-swivel, and stretchy suspenders moves — that turn Bheem and Ram into action figures of pure joy. The suspender bit was an on-the-spot innovation by the choreographer.
As movie musical fans know (and wish everyone knew), how you shoot a dance is as important as the moves. Rajamouli gets this, and in one of the vivid variations in his camerawork, he films the grinning stars head-to-toe facing the camera as they dance side by side.
As a track, “Naatu Naatu” is also simply a banger. The pulsating rhythms of the drums and chorus are contagiously propulsive, and they feel more organic than many synthetic beats. M. M. Keeravani, the song’s composer, compared the sound to the traditional beats of folk songs celebrated in villages. “That’s why this particular time signature and beat is selected for this song,” he said, referring to the rollicking 6/8 tempo.
The rustic sound also comes alive in the instrumentation. In recording “Naatu Naatu,” Keeravani used duffs, an Indian skin drum held with the hands.
Eight or more duffs were used for the beats, primarily supported by timpani and other percussion from a synthesizer and mandolins for the melody, along with further processed elements. As the dance marathon reaches a fevered pitch, the beats and vocals grow trancelike with help from a throbbing echo effect.
The singers on the track, Rahul Sipligunj and Kaala Bhairava, lend a festive bounce and snap to the verses, playfully embodied by Jr. NTR and Charan.
Both Keeravani and Chandrabose underlined the very local sense of naatu. “It’s a word that says ‘something of our own, our own culture,’” Keeravani said. That’s reflected in how the “Naatu Naatu” sequences unfolds. Bheem and Ram defeat the colonial oppressors through their own tradition of dance.
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The song alone is estimated to have cost around Rs 15 crores .
The song was shot in a period of 15 days in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, in August 2021. The Indian artists in the song playing waiters are Indian medical students studying in Ukraine.