Location Diaries: Double Trouble 

When Aadhi Pinisetty signed up for the Tamil-Telugu bilingual, U Turn, he didn’t have much indication of the trouble that would come his way. Shooting for the first bilingual of his career took some getting used to. Aadhi, who plays a cop in the Samantha-starrer, had to shoot each scene in Tamil first, and then do it in Telugu immediately. 

“Normally, when I give a shot, the minute it gets over, I’d come out of the mood and think about the next shot. Since I was used to that, all through the shooting of U Turn, I would give my shot and then walk away from the set to take a break, only to have director Pavan Kumar come running behind me to remind me that I had to give the same shot in the other language. But now that I’ve gotten used to this, I’m well-prepared to shoot another bilingual,” says Aadhi.

Another aspect of shooting simultaneously in two languages, is having to remember and replicate the same gestures, modulations and expressions of the previous shot in the other language. Aadhi explains, “Normally, I plan the way I’m going to etch out my character. But for U Turn, director Pavan Kumar gave me a free hand and told me to just go with the flow. As a result, when I completed a shot in Tamil, I wouldn’t quite remember the nuances of the shot in detail for the Telugu version. I didn’t want to observe the monitor and replicate what I had done because I felt the spontaneity would be lost and it would look artificial. So it was quite tricky. Also, voice modulations differ in Tamil and Telugu, and I had to incorporate that factor into my body language as well.”

Sometimes though, the second shot would be better than the first and Pavan would ask the actor to re-shoot the original. “It could have become a never-ending sequence, because each shot could turn out to be better. We could have ended up extending the shoot and I may have had to recall everything I had done earlier! But Pavan is a chilled out person and we had a good laugh over it.”