Exclusive! 'I agreed to invest in Head Bush because of Agni Sreedhar's script,' says Dhananjaya

Dhananjaya’s decision to turn producer with Badava Rascal might have surprised many, but the actor’s conviction in the material of his choice disproved the critics. Not only did Badava Rascal, the film, yield great box office results, but it also made Dhananjaya the master of his own fate, so to speak. “I did not want to feel lost as an actor playing villains again and again,” he says in a recent conversation before highlighting that he took up film production to not only support his interests as an actor but to also prove himself as a bankable star who is capable of converting the love of the masses into ticket sales.

“One needs to be stupid to a certain degree to become a producer, but if you can’t draw crowds to the theatre as a hero or a protagonist, you can’t expect your remuneration to increase. And you won’t be able to play the roles that you have always wanted to, so it is crucial you that go independent and prove yourself at the box office. That’s how Badava Rascal came about and the film was a superhit, and even though Head Bush had begun before Badava Rascal became successful, I decided to take things a notch up. Because unless you go on raising the bar, other producers would not feel comfortable in investing in you,” says Dhananjaya.

And to support this ‘risk’ and the vision behind Badava Rascal, Dhananjaya decided to collaborate with the veteran author and screenwriter Agni Sreedhar (also a reformed gangster). Sreedhar, who has previously written the screenplays of films like Aa Dinagalu and Edegarike, was reportedly not keen on returning to the world of cinema but was coaxed by director Shoonya to take up the project that would soon be shaped as Head Bush. It was then that Dhananjaya got involved:

“I have always been a huge fan of Agni Sreedhar sir’s writing – be it in the novel form like My Days in The Underworld or Edegarike and even the film adaptations of these films. So, when Shoonya, the director of Head Bush, came to me with Sreedhar sir’s script, I was really kicked about being a part of it. And the script remained the main attraction for me all along – I have said it in a number of interviews that I chose to invest money in the film because of Agni Sreedhar sir’s script. And yet, his approach and vision for the idea was totally different from ours because he wished for the story to be told at a slightly lower scale but I, along with the rest of the core team, saw the film being executed at a bigger scale. When it came to the stylized action sequences and stuff, Sreedhar would ask us if they were necessary, saying that the real-life situations did not feature such fights. But we believed that if it wasn’t for them, we might not be able to pull the audiences to the theatres. That said, we have managed to strike a great balance between the two approaches because this is not a regular mass entertainer – along with the commercial elements, the film also features a strong core,” says Dhananjaya.

And while there have been multiple attempts made at the genre before, especially with Bengaluru underworld as the backdrop, team Head Bush was compelled to take a new approach to the subject. In this vein, Dhananjaya says, “See, as much as Head Bush is a gangster drama, it also a political drama that discusses many facets of the time through Jayaraj. Be it the Indira Brigade or Jayaraj’s own Gareebi Hatao programme, or the fact that he was hand-picked by a political entity which got him a lot of fame and power – we have also carefully discussed the ideological differences that existed at the time and these people, despite being part of the group, differed from one another on certain aspects.”

Head Bush releases in theatres on October 21 and marks Dhananjaya’s second production venture under Daali Pictures. Shoonya makes the debut with the film with Yogesh, Payal Rajput, Vasishta N. Simha, Raghu Mukherjee, Sruthi Hariharan, Devaraj, Prakash Belawadi, Balu Nagendra, and others forming the principal cast.