Nitesh Tiwari Reveals: The Ravana vs Jatayu Battle Took 6.5 Years to Create

Director Nitesh Tiwari has revealed a detail about Ramayana: Rise of a Legend that contextualises the ambition behind this production more completely than any box office number ever could.

The sequence where Ravana attacks and kills Jatayu — the great eagle who tries to rescue Sita during her abduction — took 6.5 years to create from initial concept to final visual. The Pushpak Viman, Ravana's flying chariot, went through 40 to 50 distinct design iterations before Tiwari was satisfied.

"We started working on this sequence almost from the moment the project was announced in 2022," Tiwari told reporters in a press interaction on November 1. "Every visual element, every camera angle, every beat of the music — we knew this sequence had to be the emotional and visual centrepiece of Part 1. We could not rush it."

Why the Jatayu Scene Matters

For those unfamiliar with the Ramayana, Jatayu is one of the most beloved characters in the entire epic. The ancient vulture king, who had sworn loyalty to King Dasharatha, intercepts Ravana as he abducts Sita in the Pushpak Viman. Already old and weakened, Jatayu fights with every ounce of his strength. He is mortally wounded but not killed outright — he clings to life long enough to tell Ram what happened, to tell him which direction Ravana flew. His sacrifice is what allows the search for Sita to begin.

In Valmiki's Ramayana, the sight of the dying Jatayu moves Ram to tears. It is one of the epic's most emotionally devastating moments. Tiwari and his team knew they were building toward something that hundreds of millions of people had a deep emotional relationship with.

Getting it wrong was not an option.

The Pushpak Viman Problem

The Pushpak Viman — the mythological flying vehicle said to move at the speed of thought — presented a particular design challenge. It is described in Valmiki's Ramayana with extraordinary specificity: a sky palace made of gold, with balconies and gardens, capable of carrying entire armies. Translating this into a visual form that would satisfy the imagination of a billion-person audience while also serving the film's emotional and narrative needs took years.

"We went through 40, maybe 50 designs," Tiwari said. "Some were too ornate. Some looked like aircraft. Some were too temple-like. We needed something that felt mythological and divine but also visceral and threatening — because in this scene, it is Ravana's weapon as much as his vehicle."

The final design, seen in both Trailer 1 and Trailer 2, has drawn consistent praise from audiences online: golden, impossibly large, somehow simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.

The VFX Reality Behind the Scene

The Jatayu battle was produced by DNEG (Double Negative), the Academy Award-winning visual effects studio whose credits include Dune, Inception, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer. With 1,200+ VFX artists working across five studios over multiple years, Ramayana's total VFX output is among the most ambitious ever assembled for a single project.

The Jatayu sequence alone required:

• Motion capture for Jatayu's movements and death sequence
• Physics simulation for feathers, blood, and high-altitude impact
• Full digital construction of the Pushpak Viman in flight
• Sky and cloudscape generation across the entire sequence
• Colour grading for the deep orange of a sunset — the visual design of the abduction at dusk carries both mythological and emotional significance
• Sound design built in collaboration with Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman's teams

Tiwari noted that thousands of individual VFX artists contributed to this sequence across its development timeline — many of them working on other phases of the film simultaneously and returning to Jatayu at different stages.

The Emotional Brief

Beyond the technical, Tiwari shared his creative brief for the sequence: "I told our VFX supervisors and storyboard artists: I need the audience to feel that they are watching something that actually happened. Not a cartoon, not a game. A real event that broke the world."

He drew inspiration from accounts of real battles: "Great battles have chaos. They have suffering. The horror of the Jatayu sequence is not just that this mighty bird is being killed — it is that he is being killed doing something hopeless and noble at the same time. He cannot win. He knows he cannot win. He fights anyway."

The voice of Jatayu is provided by Amitabh Bachchan — a casting decision that Tiwari called "the only possible choice." "When Jatayu speaks, when he dies and gives Ram the information that changes everything — that moment needed a voice that could carry a thousand years of weight. Amitabh-ji gave us that."

What This Says About the Film as a Whole

The 6.5-year creation timeline for a single sequence is not a marketing talking point. It reflects a production philosophy that consistently prioritised creative ambition over commercial efficiency.

Indian cinema has never spent this kind of time and care on a single scene. The Baahubali 2 battle sequences — celebrated as the benchmark of Indian epic filmmaking — were developed over months. The Jatayu sequence was iterated over years.

The Pushpak Viman's 50 design iterations are not unusual for Hollywood's highest-budget productions. For an Indian film, they represent a leap of faith that the ambition could be justified. With advance bookings crossing Rs 100 crore before a single showing, that faith appears to have been met.

Whether audiences embrace the full film or not, the Ravana-Jatayu battle will be discussed as a landmark moment in Indian cinematic history — a sequence built with patience and ambition that the industry has rarely seen.

Ramayana: Rise of a Legend opens in India on November 8, 2026 (Diwali). Premiere shows began November 5.