Exclusive! Danish Sait and I are like two bodies and one brain: Vamsidhar Bhogaraju

Days before his directorial debut, One Cut Two Cut, released on Amazon Prime Video, we’d caught up with comedian-actor Vamsidhar Bhogaraju about his Danish Sait-starrer film. Produced by the late Puneeth Rajkumar’s banner PRK Productions, the film’s direct-to-OTT release, which would bring it to millions of people across the globe, had Vamsi’s stomach in knots – nervous but excited at the prospect. Here are excerpts from our quick conversation.

“I am nervous and excited. In terms of it being available across the planet, I thank Amazon Prime for that. I don’t think any director can ask for more. And the association with Appu sir (Puneeth) and PRK productions was a fantastic experience and I have immense gratitude to them for helping us. I hope we put out a product that will make everyone associated with it proud,” says Vamsi.

One Cut Two Cut, though, is not Vamsi’s first collaboration with Danish; the duo has been friends for a while and the former has writing credits on the latter’s films and social media content. “We’ve been really good friends for a long time now and it only helps because if I give Danish something, he will take it and make it bigger. Both of us are quite silly people, so we just have a lot of fun working together. It just helps working with someone like Danish, with whom I have collaborated on a lot of content. We are like two bodies, one brain. Both of us think on similar lines. We don’t have to explain much to each other when we work together,” he tells us about their relationship dynamic.

The film, meanwhile, released on Amazon Prime Video on February 3, and it was clear from the trailer that the four activists taking the school hostage had some Money Heist influence – they were in red jumpsuits after all. “You have to watch the film to understand why they are doing what they are doing. We just went with it because we thought it would be quirky. See, these four terrorists are very silly, stupid people, who don’t have too many original thoughts, so the fact that they would be inspired by a Money Heist, just in terms of the costume, that’s exactly where the similarity ends. After that there’s nothing else to do with Money Heist,” explains Vamsi.

One Cut Two Cut presents one of Danish’s not too often seen social media avatars, Gopi, as an arts and crafts teacher. The only other time we’ve seen him before is when he reviews ‘non-veg films’ or tries to ‘sell’ himself in the marriage market. Was there an attempt to sanitize Gopi, given that the film has a clean U censor certification? “No, this is something that Appu sir always told us, ‘When you make a film, it has to be accessible to everyone from age six to sixty. It’s always nice to have something that the whole family can sit together and watch. Yes, in those short videos Gopi reviews non-veg films, but in our film, he is asking for Andhra meals, which is vegetarian. There was no deliberate attempt to sanitize him. The fact that you are putting Gopi in a school as a teacher it would be unwise to have non-veg jokes,” he says.

Elaborating on the writing process, from taking a 2-minute short video and making it an 85-minute film, Vamsidhara says, “Every character has a complete arc, each one has a motive and there’s no one just loitering around. Each one is strongly selfish and delusional in their own quirky ways. When you have interesting characters in interesting situations, you get interesting content. It was a lot of fun in writing the four terrorists, as well as the journalist track and Gopi’s love story, all of which happen parallelly, during this whole situation of what’s going to happen to this school. The humour is not about these people telling jokes; they are just being themselves that it’s funny for us to watch.”