Composer M.M. Keeravaani on his Golden Globe win for RRR’s “Naatu Naatu”

M.M. Keeravaani. // Courtesy the artist

Director S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR is a smash success. The Telugu action film respectively stars N. T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan as two real-life Indian revolutionaries, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, and hypothesizes a fictional relationship between the two as they fight against British colonizers in early 20th-century India.

That is, of course, a summary which doesn’t even begin to accurately convey the off-the-wall action sequences, brilliant comedic timing, and fantastic song-and-dance sequences which make this three-hour long film breeze by in what seems like no time at all.

It’s a feast for the senses, taking everything which makes watching a movie fun and cranking it to the very maximum allowed.

The centerpiece of the film–outside of the action setpieces, which see one man fighting an entire throng of protesters, rescuing a child in the midst of a massive fireball, and using jungle cats as weapons during a battle with British soldiers–is the song “Naatu Naatu,” wherein Rama Rao and Charan defeat snooty upper-class society through the power of dance, soundtracked by a song which uplifts their country upbringing.

With music composed by M.M. Keeravaani and lyrics by Chandrabose, even if you don’t speak a word of Telugu, when you watch the film on Netflix, you’ll be repeatedly rewinding it to see if you can puzzle out just how the actors onscreen execute the hypnotic hook step.

Unsurprisingly, the song just won a Golden Globe for Best Original Song, marking the first Asian composition to ever win the award.

We spoke with composer Keeravaani the morning after his win about how all of this came to pass.

The Pitch: Congratulations on your win. Was there anyone that you were afraid you’d forget to thank?

M.M. Keeravaani: Yeah, and I wanted to thank many people, but unfortunately I got only one and a half minute time last night. So, you know you should be grateful to everyone, every single person who had helped you in the process of your success. Nobody should be ignored. Not a single person, not a tiny thing, should be ignored because gratitude is the only thing that’s good to practice all the time. That’s a good feeling. Gratitude is a good feeling.

What does this first American award mean to you? Is it particularly special, or are all awards special in their own way?

It’s a great achievement. It’s like being on the top of the world. As a child, I started listening to Western music with the song from The Carpenters. You must know the song, “Top of the World”? It was a great feeling.

When director S.S. Rajamouli was on Seth Meyers Monday, he said, “I make films for Indians in India and across the globe. When appreciation came in from the west, our initial thought was that these are friends of Indians who have seen RRR.” How have you seen Indian viewers’ response versus those of other fans around the world?

I was not surprised. I was not at all surprised by the very good response I got from India because primarily it’s an Indian movie and made for an Indian audience, but the response coming from the West is overwhelming.

Do you think RRR‘s success will open international viewers to the world of Indian film who might not have otherwise been familiar with it?

Of course. There was this pandemic that happened for the past two years, so we had nothing to do at home, but for just wait for good times to come back and just being on survival mode. I am a Telugu person. I speak Telugu. We rarely go and watch other language movies in India itself because India has many languages.

So not knowing what to do, we resort to Netflix and other platforms, and we started watching Malayalam movies.

Malayalam is a foreign language for us. Malayalam is Indian language only. It’s a different state, so we happen to come across lots of beautiful and masterpieces from Malayalam. So most of us got hooked on watching Malayalam movies ever since, so a great platform–another chamber is open for us–so a similar thing will happen internationally. That’s what I’m expecting. Just like we started watching Malayalam movies after pandemic, after this recognition of what RRR backed, I hope and I believe that international audiences are going to watch Indian movies hereafter on a regular basis.

When you’re composing the score for RRR, what was the process of fitting this big set piece of a song into the overall score?

The overall score goes by the emotions, the intense emotions and action factor that RRR has to offer, but “Naatu Naatu” is something different where the mood is entirely about just celebrating and dancing, so it’ll stand out in the movie, as well as other songs happening contemporarily.

It was our intention to make it exclusively a standing-out song and to make it an exclusively energetic song with energy and stamina. Those are the two factors we have in mind when attempting the song by taking the beat, choreography, other music, other beats, other lyrics–our intention is to just back the attention of the listeners and use just by the stamina that. That was our aim to achieve. That’s what we achieved.

Because you obviously have to write the song before they can shoot and perform it, how did the description of the scene originally read in the script before there were words or music or anything?

The description says, briefly, like this: “In a party joined by Britishers, there is a guest invited by a lady, but mostly unwanted by others there. He has to face some hostility from a particular person who is jealous of him because of his attention, diverted by his girlfriend, so he tries to intimidate him and insult him in the crowd.

The other friend saves him with a peppy song, with the energy-oriented, with a mass song. And in the process of defending themselves and safeguarding this dignity or vanity, they overpower the crowd and others, leaving them in awestruck response.”

The purpose of the song is to dominate the others with their own identity, ethnicity, and their own style of singing and dancing.

How closely did you work with lyricist Chandrabose to craft the song?

I started working with Chandrabose for the past 25 years and more so I know what he can deliver exactly, and he knows about me. We are in perfect harmony. He wrote the words first, and the words are written, returned, and I took the lyrics and tried to do justice to those lyrics.

He notably said in a recent interview that he wrote 90% of the song in half a day, and then it took almost two years to get the other 10% done.

This song, of course, has gone through many changes and corrections, so it took a lot of time for him to complete the song. It was one hell of a process, but in the end, it has paid off. The results are clearly visible here. The hard work did not go unnoticed.

RRR is currently streaming on Netflix, and will play on the big screen at Screenland Armour on Friday, Jan. 27, and Sunday, Jan. 29. You can find tickets for the Screenland showings here.