Tagaru Palya director Umesh K Krupa on casting Nagabhushana | 'Needed an entertainer, not a mass hero'

Debutant director Umesh K. Krupa says that he was certain right from the outset that he needed his leading man in 'Tagaru Palya' to be an entertainer before anything else. But more importantly, he needed that actor at the fore to be rid of an image, meaning that he did not want a bona fide "star" to play the role. 

"I cannot tell this story through a "mass" hero. Audiences have different kinds of expectations of mass heroes and when they aren't met, it impacts the film. We need someone who could entertain and keep the story, that particular situation in the story as the main priority. So, when you watch Nagabhushana in that lead role, you don't necessarily have set expectations and will instead connect with the story, the subject," he says.

And the subject he has chosen is, indeed, very unique and brimming with idiosyncrasies that not many in Karnataka, let alone the entire country, are familiar with. Tagaru Palya is centred around a specific ritual in rural Karnataka that involves sacrificing a ram or 'Tagaru' in front of the local deity. The sacrifice, in the film, is meant as a token of gratitude for Pandappa (Rangayana Raghu) who invites half the village to be part of the ritual but little does he know that things will slowly but surely spiral out of control over the course of the day. 

"Though my father belonged to Tumkur, his job required him to go to Shivamogga and that's where I have lived all my life. But every time I returned to Tumkur, say for a festival, I would find myself fascinated by all these characters, their language, their behaviour etc. I would find people who wouldn't wear a panche and be quite chilled about the way they moved around, which wasn't the case wherever I lived. And some of the incidents that you see in the film, too, occurred around me in real life - once I even saw people speaking to God directly because something went wrong and I was so surprised to see that," he says