What Kind Words Did James Cameron Give SS Rajamouli?

Filmmakers are often told they are competing for jobs and forced into situations where they feel in direct opposition to the artists around them.

That can be the unfortunate nature of Hollywood. But I find it's much more constructive to be a cheerleader for your particular area of expertise. When they make leaps forward or open avenues, it's not usually just for them.

That's why I find the kind words exchanged between James Cameron and SS Rajamouli to be such an epic display of two artists in support of one another.

Let's dive in.

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Back when RRR was tearing up screens across the world, James Cameron met SS Rajamouli and celebrated the director's bombastic film, which was driving people to theaters and taking over streaming.

At the time, SS Rajamouli shared with Cinemablend that Cameron offered some incredibly helpful and kind words to him.

Rajamouli said that Cameron said, "I have seen his clips talking about RRR again, and it made me happy once again. We had a long conversation on RRR, and the words that I remember most is like ‘You continue doing the films the way you do.’ That's the one thing I remember from him. It's a great compliment. I thank him again for that. I'm going in my own way about getting visuals on screen, IMAX being one of them."

Those words may not seem like a lot, but they stuck with Rajamouli. And now that he's working on his new epic, Varanasi. A movie shot for IMAX that caused him to really ruminate on Cameron's words.

He detailed his process to Cinemablend, saying, "Once we started writing the script as the details started emerging, we realized we needed something bigger to encompass these visuals apart from all the existing technologies that we used before. Obviously, the first thing that came to our mind was IMAX. Not the 1:1.9, we wanted one to 1:1.4, the big 3:4 large screen. That is because, as shown in the glimpse, the worlds are huge. Let it be Antarctica, let it be Africa, on top of that. Let it be the Rama episode from the Ramayana, where you see the Jains who are 125 feet tall. To encompass all these things, to do justice for them, we needed IMAX."

This sounds like an epic movie and one I cannot wait to see on the big screen. And I know that opening weekend, one of the first people to see will be James Cameron. And as I said, there's a great lesson here. Cameron is not a guy posturing that he's the king of IMAX or throwing shade; he's someone celebrating how others use the medium and who's there if they need advice.

That's how you get ahead.

Varanasi is hitting theaters around the world on April 7, 2027.

Let me know what you think in the comments.