Happy Birthday, Prashanth Neel. The filmmaker turns 44 today. To mark the occasion, superstar Prabhas, who also appeared in the director's latest film Salaar: Part 1 – Ceasefire, shared a picture on Instagram Stories. The behind-the-scenes image from the sets of Salaar features Prabhas standing under an umbrella, with a sword in his hand. Right next to him, we can see Prashanth Neel in an uber-cool outfit. Along with the photo, Prabhas wrote, “Love you, sir! Have a beautiful birthday!” Prabhas also attached a smiling emoji to his caption. Released in December last year, Salaar also featured Prithviraj Sukumaran and Shruti Haasan in key roles.
Ahead of Salaar's release, Prashanth Neel talked about how Prabhas' films like Adipurush and Radhe Shyam, which failed to perform well at the box office, do not harm his star image. In an interview with PTI, the director said, "Prabhas is a big star. After Baahubali, he became the biggest star. People are not going to forget something like that. Stars have always been stars; they can have one flop or 20 flops, they just need to give one hit. Recently, Shah Rukh Khan showed us that a star is always a star, there's no denying that."
During the same discussion, Prashanth Neel talked about how he tried his best to portray Prabhas as his character in the movie. He shared, "There was never a pressure to make Salaar. The idea is to make sure that the actor looks like a character. You don't want to show Prabhas as Prabhas, you want to show him as a character and I tried our best to do something like that."
Before that, Prashanth Neel opened up about how the story of Salaar is divided into two films. In a chat with Pinkvilla, he said, “Salaar is a story of two friends, who become the biggest enemies. Friendship is the core emotion of Salaar. We are telling half the story in Salaar: Part One: Cease Fire. We are going to show this journey of friends over the course of two films.”
Click here to read Salaar: Part One: Cease Fire's review.
In addition to Salaar, Prashanth Neel has also directed the KGF franchise.