3 Rascals Conformed With Mahesh Babu

It is official now — like it was reported first by this newspaper. Director Shankar will be starting work on his next, highly anticipated bilingual movie — the remake of Bollywood blockbuster 3 Idiots starring Aamir Khan, Sharman Joshi and Madhavan. Tentatively titled 3 Rascals, this movie will be produced by Gemini Film Circuit (GFC) in both the south Indian languages. According to sources, the title for the Tamil version of the movie may be changed later. The three ‘rascals’ in the Tamil version are Vijay, Jiiva and Srikanth (Sriram to Telugu audience), the latter two will be featured in the Telugu version too along with Tollywood Super Star Mahesh Babu. Ileana will play Kareena Kapoor’s role in both the remake versions.

Elaborating on the project, the executive producer of the film Raju Easwaran of GFC, says, “We are shooting at one of the popular engineering colleges in Dehradun from December 6 onwards and will be shooting for both versions simultaneously over a period of 11 days.” This means the entire ensemble cast comprising Vijay, Mahesh Babu, Ileana, Jiiva, Srikanth and Sathyaraj will be camping at Dehradun where Shankar has decided to film a few talkie portions and also a part of a song which has already been composed by Harris Jayaraj. “It is going to be a challenging task for us,” adds Raju.

Ask him about the rumours floating in Tollywood circles about Super Star Mahesh Babu not being too pleased with the other two ‘rascals’ (actors) for the movie, apparently he felt that since both Jiiva and Srikanth are basically from Kollywood the movie would look like the Telugu star is acting in a dubbed version of the Tamil movie! A surprised Raju replies, “This is news to me! I do not want to talk about something which I am unaware of and as you said it must be just rumours.” Unlike Shankar’s earlier movies, 3 Rascals, which has Manoj Paramahamsa as the cinematographer will be completed at double the speed and will release during the summer, adds Raju.