Raj B Shetty: I will keep doing new, experimental cinema, even if it doesn’t work

Raj, who is preparing for the release of his next, Toby, says that his motto is to not repeat genres of filmmaking

Raj B Shetty and Siri Ravikumar in a still from Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye

Experimentation is the name of the game for Kannada actor-filmmaker Raj B Shetty. Although he is only two films old as a filmmaker and made two others that are yet to reach audiences, one thing that he is very clear about is that he will never repeat himself just because something he did has worked earlier.

Speaking to an online Kannada channel, Raj explained why he didn’t do another gangster film after Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana and instead chose to make a drastically different movie called Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye or Toby, for that matter. The trick, he says, lies in not dwelling on what has been and moving on, which means that once his films are in theatres, he closes those chapters and does not revisit it. “I watch my films with my technical team once, and then at the premiere, but after that, it becomes a thing of the past. Only when I detach myself like that do I get the creative space to write a film like Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye,” he said.

Raj added that what’s also helped him in this process is that he does not stick to formula. “Sometimes, we tend to get stuck to a certain image that comes from your previous work. Just because people think I should do more gangster films because I did a good job at it with Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana, I will not do it. I would rather do something new, even if I fail at it. It’s about trying something different, irrespective of how it performs,” he reasons.

Toby, says Raj, is a film that he began writing after Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye, in the hope that it helps in the movement to get people to return to the cinemas. The film, which will be in theatres on August 25, has been described as a revenge drama, but Raj has been saying that it is content-driven mass film about a family man and how circumstances drive him to the point of unleashing all the fury he’d withheld all the while.

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