I’m back home in Udupi to tell my own story: Shine Shetty

In the year since Shine Shetty moved back home to Udupi from Bengaluru, he says he has begun experiencing life anew. “It’s as if time has turned back. I find myself visiting pretty shops to buy chikki, eating at roadside stalls where the radio is playing, greeting bus drivers I used to know from my college days… It’s a beautiful phase in my life that I never thought I’d get to relive. And I’m happy that filmmaking has made all of this happen,” avers Shine. The actor has stepped into a new chapter of his professional journey as a producer with his upcoming film Shankara Bharanam, set against the coastal backdrop of Karnataka. Excepts: ‘Not every film has to go pan-India’ When I decided to produce Shankara Bharanam, I wondered whether we should make it simultaneously in Telugu or Malayalam. But then I thought of several films that began as small, rooted stories, and after they succeeded, neighbouring industries rushed to buy the remake rights. That gave me a huge boost. I realised that trying to go pan-India right from the start is the wrong way to approach filmmaking. My lm is based in Udupi, so let me first make it acceptable to my own Kannada audience. Not every lm needs to go pan-India, nor does it need to make ` 50 crores. Let’s not intimidate small lmmakers who want to move away from lavish lmmaking and simply focus on telling good stories.‘Being a reality TV star helped me capitalise on my popularity’ Today everyone talks about Bigg Boss because it’s impossible to ignore a show of that magnitude. You enter the show with 9,000 followers and when it wraps up three months later, there are half a million followers on your pro le. The show gives you a huge opportunity to build popularity, but it’s important to channel it in the right direction. I used that popularity to scale up my hotel business — I sold it a while ago — and it reaped big rewards. Reality shows help create a brand, but you have to use that brand wisely. You get many lm offers when you come out, but I didn’t nd anything substantial. I’d like to believe that today, when I make a lm, people know me and would want to come and watch it. However, having seen the hype social media creates — I understand its power. It raises awareness, creates recall value, and puts your product in front of the audience. But one cannot expect likes and shares to automatically convert into ticket sales'Filmmaking is the toughest job — that’s my biggest realisation’ I’ve been a television actor, a reality TV star, a mainstream actor, and now I’m turning lmmaker. I genuinely wonder how people like Rakshit Shetty and Rishab Shetty do this regularly — it’s incredibly tough to be both an actor and a lmmaker at the same time. Filmmaking is never easy, especially at a crucial time like ours, when you have to carefully gauge the taste of a unique audience like the Kannada audience. They enjoy realistic lms in other languages, but in their own language they don’t always relate to pure realism. They like realism blended with a touch of fantasy — and Sarkari Hi. Pra. Shaale, Kasaragodu is a perfect example of that balance. As a debutant lmmaker, I chose to play safe by picking a story rooted in my region and drawn from my own experiences of travelling by bus every day. The coastal belt has a quirky private bus culture — if you know anyone who’s lived there, they’ll tell you what a mind-blowing experience it is.