Ram Gopal Varma recalled an interesting conversation he once had with SS Rajamouli about Sandeep Reddy Vanga during his recent roundtable conversation with the Animal filmmaker and his Shiva star Nagarjuna. The Company director said that once Rajamouli said on stage at an event that he is once-in-a-blue moon filmmaker. "When he saw Animal, Rajamouli called me and said, 'I take back my words. He (Sandeep) is Ram Gopal Varma ka baap,'" the Company filmmaker said, eliciting smiles from Nagarjuna and Sandeep. The filmmaker, admitting that he had no idea about the comparison between him and Sandeep, also suggested that the Animal director has earned it. He revealed that Sandeep is distinctive "in terms of attitude and thumbing his nose against conventional cinema, whether it be about characters or scene conception."

Despite praising Sandeep, the Shiva filmmaker has objectively criticised the former's film, starring Ranbir Kapoor, Rashmika Mandanna, and Anil Kapoor in the lead roles. The filmmaker recently revealed that he disliked the relationship between Anil's father character and Ranbir's son in the film and the now-infamous scene where the hero demands Triptii Dimri's character to lick his shoe. "It was not consistent," the Satya filmmaker said about the aforementioned scene.