HYDERABAD, June 10 -- Buchi Babu Sana spent Wednesday morning doing two things that do not usually happen together: explaining why the most criticized scenes in "Peddi" were artistically necessary, and confirming he had already cut them out of the film.

The director's first extended defense of the sequences involving Janhvi Kapoor's character, in remarks reported by Business Today and carried across the Indian press, amounts to a careful straddle. He believes audiences "misread Janhvi Kapoor's track as unnecessary in an otherwise good story." He also concedes that "a few shots turned misleading," and that the production has "taken corrective measures to remove them, and we have removed them."

That second sentence is the precedent. A fil...