Rana Daggubati opens up on the Telugu film industry’s nepotistic nature

Rana Daggubati opened up on the nepotistic nature of the Telugu film industry. The star said that it’s an industry held together by families, who give their all to make movies, going against all odds to bring their vision to life. The Telugu film industry is dominated by stars such as Rana Daggubati, Mahesh Babu, Jr NTR, Allu Arjun, Naga Chaitanya and Prabhas, all of whom hail from film families. One of the biggest breakout stars to have emerged from the outside has been actor Vijay Deverakonda.

In an interview with a popular entertainment portal, when asked why the Telugu film industry, run by three or four big, powerful families, including his, doesn’t get the flak that Bollywood does for nepotism, Rana said the answer lies in how the industry took shape in its early days.

“I moved to Hyderabad 25 years ago from Chennai, when a bunch of Telugu people moved to another place that just had rocks and everyone was trying to build houses and make movies in those houses. That’s what the entertainment industry was. No one wanted to be a part of this. In the early days, people would come and say, ‘Sir my son has failed the 10th grade. He is not going to do anything. Why don’t you make him an assistant director in your movie’. That was our world, the kind of people who wanted to come. It was looked down upon by the elite, educated world. What was there? Just families who held it. This is what we do, this is what we will do generation after generation and create that eco-system.”

Rana said building a studio is the ‘stupidest thing’ that a person can do, but Hyderabad has six of them. “That’s the love we have for art and storytelling.”