Sreekar Prasad is one of the leading editors in India who has won the National Film Awards multiple times. Recently, he won the award for Best Editing for the Tamil film Sivaranjiniyum Innum Sila Pengalum. He had edited many hit films since his debut in 1986 in multiple languages including Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and Malayalam. He was also the editor of the film that got recognised internationally, RRR. The editor gave an exclusive interview with Galatta Media and shared about his projects.
The editor Sreekar Prasad shared some interesting details about his previous works in the interview with Galatta media and also shared about deleted scenes from Ponniyin Selvan. In a special segment, the interview shows some interesting sequences from films he worked in, including RRR, and he shared about editing the sequence. The 12 man shootout scene from 'Thalapathy' Vijay’s Thuppakki was played. The editor shared that “This was a good scene by itself and it was high too, but there was some difficulty in it. Because when they shot the film 12 people should follow 12 others, so it was long shot. We had about 7-11 hours of rushes. So we had to compress it. When we edited it as 12 people following 12 others it was 25 minutes long. We can’t watch it like that because it will be repetitive. So, we used some methods, like split frames of four people following four, eight people following eight others and we pushed the story ahead, so we can go quickly to the culmination, the end (shoot out) scene”
Director of Thuppakki, A.R. Murgadoss shared about the editor Sreekar Prasad in a recent interview on Galatta Plus with national award-winning film critic Baradwaj Rangan. A clip was shown to the editor, where the director talks about another scene from Thuppakki where 'Thalapathy' Vijay would crack an important plot of his enemy in the film. About that scene, Sreekar Prasad said “When he saw a film after editing. We edited it, he saw it and the film was lengthy. He saw that scene and said this is not that important sir. I said 'no sir, if there is no feeling that he (Vijay's character Jagadish) has found out about then when there will be a question of his intelligence'. I thought there should be a time for the thought process and music. At that time, Murugadoss felt that he did not want to eat into the length of his scenes, this was a montage. For me, we did not treat him as a larger-than-life character in editing, so to make it realistic we did it. Because, even an intelligent person will take some time to crack it"