Exclusive! "It took a lot of convincing to get Puneeth sir and Ramya ma'am to troll us": Hostel Hudugaru Bekagiddare director Nithin Krishnamurthy

The upcoming comedy-drama, which comes with the tagline of 'Worst Movie in the History of Cinema,' has grown in prominence for its innovative, self-deprecatory tone of pre-release promotions.

Puneeth Rajkumar and Ramya turning sassy against the Hostel Hudugaru

It takes a village to put together a successful film, they say, but in the case of Nithin Krishnamurthy's Hostel Hudugaru Bekagiddare the same village boasts of a few top-league celebrities as well. With a collective pursuit of making, promoting, and releasing the 'Worst Movie Ever Made in the History of Cinema', the young team led by Nithin is exploring a rather peculiar-but-effective approach which comprises fun and whimsical gags/promos with actors like Puneeth Rajkumar, Kiccha Sudeep, Rakshit Shetty, Kantara Rishab Shetty, and, of course, Ramya. Right from first-look reveals, poster launches, to incessant casting pleas, the Hudugaru are employing their A-game as far as the promotions are concerned.

"First, we are a young team and if you consider the fact that our film does not feature an "A-lister", so to speak, it would mean that we had to do something out-of-the-box with our marketing and promotions. And it's also a matter of making the best of your publicity funds - most films, at least those of our scale, have about Rs. 1 crore dedicated for their pre-release promotions but we don't have the luxury. At best, we might be able to allot half of that so there is no other option but to be creative. We got stars like Appu sir, Rakshit Sir, and even Ramya ma'am but we needed to make the best use of their time and fame," says director Nithin Krishnamurthy, who adds that his personal experience of conceiving and directing promos and advertisements for Zee Kannada has certainly come into play here.

But how did Nithin and his team manage to get all the big stars to be so snarky for the promos? From Puneeth Rajkumar declaring that this, quite indeed, is the worst film of all time to Sandalwood Queen Ramya referring to it as a 'Kitthogiro Film' (a piece of cr*p), there is an apparent self-deprecatory tone to these videos. And although the team is quite chill about getting trolled, it took some convincing on their part to have the actors become trolls for the sake of promotions.

"None of the stars wanted to say anything bad about the film! Both Appu sir and Ramya ma'am did not want to be so critical of the film but we convinced them by saying that since we are going with the tagline of the 'Worst Film Ever Made in the History of Cinema', they had to troll us. Ramya ma'am, in particular, wasn't very keen on being so mean on the screen because she is genuinely a very sweet person and since she had already watched the film and liked it too, it seemed a little bizarre to her to term it a 'kitthogiru film'. But we told her this was only a part of our publicity campaign and the truth is that none of us in the team wanted to talk big of ourselves. Promoting the film any differently did not excite us all that much."

"Also, to draw the audiences to cinema halls, we have got to keep them engaged with the promos and indirectly communicate that this is the brand of humour they can expect from the full-length film. Hostel Hudugaru Bekagiddare brims with pop-culture comedy and references and audience members of any generation - be it the 80s, 90s, or even the current lot - will be able to relate to the tone of our humour. That's the idea behind our promos too. In fact, we brought our first video featuring Puneeth sir out almost two months before the now-very popular Rahul Dravid ad came out. I don't mean to compare but all we tried to do was introduce a more western sensibility like self-deprecation to our content here because that's how our film has been made as well," shares Nithin.

That said, Nithin and his entire brigade are quite kicked about presenting Hostel Hudugaru Bekagiddare to the world and in all honesty, they feel that their film is anything but the 'worst in the history of cinema'. "A first-of-its-kind found-footage comedy film set completely in a boys hostel that features as many as 300 artists," says the director who has also served as one of the four producers of the film along with Prajwal B.P. Varun Kumar, and Arvind S. Kashyap (also the cinematographer). Hostel Hudugaru Bekagiddare is currently in the post-production phase and the team aims for an early 2023 theatrical release.

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