Right from my debut film "SHIVA" I was always interested in larger than life rebellious characters be it Satya, Company, Sarkar etc., and there's no one who is more unique in this regard than Veerappan.
Veerappan was the most dangerous man in Asia and arguably the whole world because unlike Osama Bin Laden he didn’t even have an organization.
He was just a plain criminal who walked around in chappals with a double barrel gun in his hands. I was following his activities right from the first time I heard about him till he died in 2004.
Then a few years back I happened to meet some of the people who were involved in the operation of killing him from whom I got amazing insights into both his character and I was shocked with the fascinatingly chilling way they went about planning to kill him.
I made a Kannada film based on some of the information I gathered which was called "Killing Veerappan" which became a super-hit down there. When Sachiin Joshi saw the Kannada film he told me considering the uniqueness of the character of Veerappan his story needs to be told not only to entire India but also the whole world and offered to produce it. He also suggested and I agreed that it needed to be made in a much more elaborate manner and on a much bigger scale.
Veerappan frankly is a reinvention for me as a director because this film has changed me both on a professional and personal level in many ways. That is primarily because of a very different way I had to develop a cinematic structure to do justice to the complexities of the subject matter of Veerappan. As a final word I feel enriched as a cinema connoisseur from my experience of making Veerappan because I had the opportunity to dwell into the most dangerous minds I have ever known and I am not talking about Veerappan and his gang. They actually belong to the people who killed him.
