Ramayana’s Raavan-Jatayu fight took 6.5 years: Nitesh Tiwari

For a film that reimagines one of India’s oldest epics, every minute of spectacle has a production timeline behind it. In Ramayana, director Nitesh Tiwari says the confrontation between Raavan and Jatayu was not a quick VFX pass. It was a separate production that ran for six and a half years.

“One action sequence.”

Tiwari told Shreyas Media that the sequence ran from his first brief to final completion over six and a half years, with thousands of artists and technicians involved. The caveat matters: he was describing work on a single fight, not the entire film.

For a production culture used to quick turnarounds, that is a startling figure. It signals that Ramayana is being assembled as a set of deeply worked set-pieces rather than a single green-screen rush.

How Pushpak Viman changed the fight

The long timeline was partly a design problem. Raavan’s flying vehicle, the Pushpak Viman, took close to two years to finalise. The team explored around 40 to 50 designs before settling on the version that appears in the film.

That final design was very different from the original idea. Since the Raavan-Jatayu battle had been planned around the earlier version, the team had to revisit and rework parts of the sequence after the Pushpak Viman found its final shape.

“We didn’t want something that did look like it could fly; we wanted some kind of science to go into it.”

For Tiwari, the goal was to make the vehicle feel as though there was science behind what happened in that era, not just fantasy. That approach explains why dozens of iterations were not optional.

Why fans should read this carefully

Fans seeing “six and a half years” might worry about delay. But this is a case where the wait is the craft. The film is being built from scratch, and a single vehicle redesign changed the action around it.

The figures break down like this:

• 6.5 years: one Raavan-Jatayu action sequence
• ~2 years: finalising the Pushpak Viman
• 40-50: Pushpak Viman designs explored
• Thousands: artists and technicians on the fight
• Result: a sequence reworked after the vehicle design changed

What this tells the audience is that Ramayana is not chasing a calendar. It is chasing an internal logic, where the flying vehicle has to feel believable before the battle built around it can be locked. That may test patience, but it also raises the ceiling for the final image, because the spectacle will carry decisions made years in advance.

Source: The Times of India