The Telugu star told The Hollywood Reporter India that rushed editing and scoring hurt the film, even as the team chose not to delay it a fourth time.
Nani isn't pretending The Paradise landed the way everyone hoped. Talking to The Hollywood Reporter India, the actor said the film could have used more time in the edit suite and with its background score, and that the team knew it going in.
"More things would have made sense narratively with the edit and the score, if we had more time. We could've smoothened it out," he said.
But here's the thing. The Paradise had already been pushed twice. By the time a third date arrived, Nani says, walking away from it again felt wrong given how long audiences had been waiting. "This was the third release date. The audience was so excited about the film that we didn't want to give up on them because of the postponement that happened so many times," he told THR India.
So they went with what they had. Whether a fourth postponement would have fixed what critics flagged is something Nani says nobody will ever know for sure. "We could've made all of that better, but we'll never know, I guess. We don't know if it would've worked better had we pushed the film," he said, framing it less as regret and more as a lesson for next time. "We all get carried away and do mistakes. But if we understand and learn from them, that's the best way we can go ahead."
The more pointed comments were about his director. Nani and Srikanth Odela made Dasara together, and The Paradise was supposed to build on that. Instead, Nani suggests the scale got away from the film somewhere along the way.
"With The Paradise, Srikanth had great ideas. But when the span of the film went up, when the expectations went up, the focus shifted from storytelling to set pieces. So, the connectivity wasn't there," Nani said. He was careful to separate the filmmaker's talent from the film's execution, calling Odela "a very, very original guy" with plenty of ideas, but adding that "after stitching them together, his bigger vision somewhere got a little diluted."
The Paradise is set in 1980s Secunderabad, with Nani playing Jadal, a leader from the marginalised Savaari community. It's a period action drama, produced by Sudhakar Cherukuri under SLV Cinemas, and it opened in theatres worldwide on September 24.
Reviews since then have been split down the middle, and online chatter around the film has stayed just as divided, with viewers debating whether the ambition on screen matched the storytelling. Nani's comments to THR India are the clearest the actor has been about why that gap exists.
What happens next for the Nani-Odela pairing isn't clear. Neither has said whether they'll work together again, and for now The Paradise is a film both the actor and, by his own account, the director know needed another pass before it reached audiences.
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