Abhishek Bachchan Pins Raja Shivaji VFX Chatter On 'Tight Budget': 'Can't Compete With Hollywood' | Exclusive

Riteish Deshmukh’s Raja Shivaji has, reportedly, become the fourth Marathi film to cross the ₹60 crore mark after Sairat, Ved and Baipan Bhari Deva. While the film is being lauded for its scale and grandeur, its trailer received mixed reactions for its VFX work. Reacting to it, Abhishek Bachchan, who plays Sambhaji Shahaji Bhosale in it, says budget often becomes a deterrent.

Speaking exclusively to News18, he states, “Maybe the common man doesn’t know but VFX is a very fine art but it’s a rain card. The more time you give it, the better it’s going to look. The more money you can pile into your VFX, the better the quality. People have to understand that at the end of the day, Riteish and Genelia (Deshmukh) have made a Marathi film within a very tight

budget.”

“Your studios may say that we aren’t going to give you a thousand crore to make this film because the market is such. But a film that has a budget of Rs 1000 crore for VFX as opposed to a film that has a much smaller budget will look different. That’s just the way it works. We love to judge but we’ve to understand how the system works,” Abhishek adds.

Abhishek feels it’s futile to compare the VFX of an Indian film to that of the west. “People love to compare a lot of our VFX work with what’s happening in Hollywood. They’ve budgets. Just to give you scale, they probably end up spending over Rs 5000 crore just on VFX, let alone the budget of the film. We can’t compete with that. That’s not our market,” he remarks.

Time constraints, according to him, also become an issue. “We probably work here at one percent of that at best for our VFX. It’s all about how much money you can put in. After a point of time, Riteish had to take a call as a producer and more importantly as a director how much time could he give it. If you give us ten years, we’ll give you a brilliant product but we don’t have that much time,” he says.

“Those ten years will also cost a lot of money. But can a film afford it? You don’t want to burden a film in that way. Had Riteish had the liberty to go and spend a thousand crore on VFX, it would be a long road. You’ve to understand that checks and balances always happen,” adds the Manmarziyaan and I Want To Talk actor.

Though ‘people tend to criticise these things’, Abhishek lauds Riteish’s vision and storytelling. “At the end of the day, it’s about telling a story and this film is an emotional story. All of this will get forgotten but when we talk about it, we’ve to understand if the film could’ve afforded it. We’ve to ask if they’ve managed to achieve what they had set out for and if they’ve conveyed the story, and the answer is yes,” he remarks.