When tigers, lions 'snored' on Puttanna Kanagal’s movie set

Pragathi Ashwath Narayan, the still photographer who has worked for Puttanna for his 11 movies, has shared an interesting comedy sequence which occurred during the shooting of a movie being directed by Puttanna.

Puttanna is the most important directors of Kannada film industry. Usually, during the shooting, he is disciplined and expected everyone to be so. He would not spare anyone who would behave otherwise. No loud talk was allowed in the set.

He always liked a silent set where he can think and implement the plans accordingly without any pressure. Everyone in the set was well aware of these unwritten rules and behaved accordingly.

But during the shooting of a milestone movie Ranganayaki at Kantheerava Studio in Bengaluru once incident introduced people to another side of Puttanna Kanagal.

It was a routine that Puttanna would take a nap after the lunch on the sets itself. On that particular day the dialogue writer of the movie, Yoganarasimha was also in the set. After lunch, he fell fast asleep, and by the time Puttanna was about to sleep, Yoganarasimha has started snoring.

He was snoring so loud that Puttanna Kanagal struggled for a while and gave up his idea of a nap. Soon, he had an idea and asked the set persons to get a tape recorder. Her recorded the snoring sound and when Yoganarasimha woke up, behaved completely naturally with him.

Puttanna engaged Yoganarasimha in a talk and told, “Yoganna, this movie is almost completed, and I am preparing for the next project. I want you to write dialogues for the new movie too.” An excited Yoganarasimha asked Puttanna about the subject of the movie.

Now Puttanna got creative and explained to him that, “This is a movie based on the forest life. I had even gone to Bandipur Reserve Forests in search of an apt location. I have even recorded the roaring of tiger and lions.”

Not stopping at it, he played the tape recorder. The entire set was silent, and this tape recorder was going on with a loud grrrr…trrr… sound.

Listening to it, Yoganarasimha was amazed and said, “You have recorded the sound really from a short distance, the roaring sound is so clear. It looks like a different story. I will surely write for it Puttanna.”

Everyone in the sets was controlling their laughter as they were scared of Puttanna. But after Puttanna was sure that Yoganarasimha had completely believed this story, he said, “Yoganna… this was not tiger or lion but you snoring.”

A startled Yoganarasimha couldn’t believe it but later came to terms with it and started laughing and said O My God! Is this how I snore,” and the entire set started bursting into laughter.