Ram Gopal Varma has cited Bruce Lee's Return of the Dragon as the main inspiration for Nagarjuna's Shiva, a trend-setting movie whose re-release has been endorsed by almost all big stars of Telugu cinema.
RGV stated that he was heavily inspired by Return of the Dragon for his debut movie. In that movie, Bruce Lee's character, Tang Lung, comes from Hong Kong to a Chinese restaurant in Rome and fights local goons trying to intimidate the owners. In Shiva, Nagarjuna's character comes from another town to a college and fights local goons who are intimidating the students and running campus politics. "I just changed the backdrop," RGV said.
"Believe it or not, I finished the script of the first half of Shiva in 20 minutes flat after watching Dragon for the 16th time," the director added at an event on Monday.
RGV's original intention was to do a horror movie with Nagarjuna. However, he was unsure whether he would want to do a film in that genre.
Shiva is up for a grand re-release on November 14th.
