India — Chethan D’Souza Is Building Two Different Action Languages for Jr NTR’s “Dragon” and Prabhas’s “Fauzi”
- Chethan D’Souza is designing the action for “Dragon” with Jr NTR and “Fauzi” with Prabhas.
- Jr NTR has slimmed down to play an assassin, so the fights are built to look believable rather than larger than life.
- D’Souza says a fight has to carry the story, or it is only a demo reel.
Posted: November 2, 2026
Fresh off “Jailer 2,” action director Chethan D’Souza is carrying two tentpoles at once, and he is deliberately refusing to give them the same vocabulary. On Prashanth Neel’s “Dragon,” the problem he describes is a physical one: Jr NTR has taken weight off and is playing an assassin, so the oversized, crowd-lifting grammar that fits a heavier star does not fit this body. D’Souza says the team “redefined the action language” for the picture — contact that reads as plausible for the frame the actor is in, with impact coming out of the moment rather than out of wire time. His line on it is a working note more than a slogan: mass action “doesn’t necessarily mean people flying through the air, slow-motion walks or jumps.”
On Hanu Raghavapudi’s “Fauzi,” the brief inverts. Prabhas, who has carried some of the biggest set-piece scale in Indian cinema, is being moved toward grounded, heavily stylised physical combat, with the emotional throughline held inside the choreography and beats of suspense built into small details rather than into the size of the gag. D’Souza, who has trained in martial arts for roughly 22 years, says he leans that background into the design when the director’s vision allows it.
For coordinators and fight designers, the useful part is the test he applies to both: a sequence that plays well cut loose on YouTube is not automatically a sequence that works inside a film. He has also designed the action for Suriya in Jithu Madhavan’s “Scene,” which opens November 6.
Learn more on IMDb: Dragon (2027) · Fauzi (2026) · Chethan D’Souza
