At a recent event, SS Rajamouli offered a simple test for judging a film. If a 2.5-hour story can be summed up in two or three lines, it's a good film. He compared it to an architect sketching an entire building on a fingernail. If the idea is clear in your head, you can compress it. A film can grow massive on screen, the Baahubali maker said, but its core should stay small.
The Varanasi maker isn't alone in this belief. Hollywood legend Alfred Hitchcock called simplicity his whole philosophy of directing. "Tell your story. Tell it with great potency. Tell it visually. Be as simple as you can," he said. That, he insisted, was his summation of filmmaking. Billy Wilder put it just as plainly: complex stories should be filmed and presented in a simple way.
Hollywood built an entire practice around this instinct. The logline tradition asks writers to reduce a script to one or two sentences, stripped of subplots and character detail, leaving only the spine of the story.
Rajamouli's Varanasi has almost wrapped up its production. Mahesh Babu, Priyanka Chopra, and Prithviraj Sukumaran are its main actors.
