Conversations with Mani Ratnam

by Baradwaj Rangan

One of my friends has taught me an Italian word, sprezzatura, which refers to making the most complex thing look simple and easily doable.

The love stories say that you’ll die without this particular person, and you know that that’s not how it is. You don’t die, you just carry on. You may be hurt, emotionally broken, but you get back on your feet. Life goes on. You assume that you meet a girl and that’s going to be it for life, and then you realize you’re not exactly like that, that you could be attracted to or be involved or interacting with other women at the same time. You reveal a layer of yourself which surprises you, that nature has made you this way. It is this realization that’s the crux of the film.

If you know what you want, it makes it easier for the others to go with you. It’s only when you don’t know what you want that their choices come into play.

This shift from paper to film, this metamorphosis, is the chemistry that makes or mars a director.

There has to be a leap from paper to screen. That’s the job of a director—to elevate what’s in the script to the next plane. You have to put in an effort to bring in other elements to make it alive. That is the key—to make it alive, to make it magical. You have to take the elements around you and invest them in that scene. You have to be able to draw the actor into that particular moment, so that he will bring something of himself into the character he is playing. It’s like shedding one skin and taking on another. The most difficult thing in the first phase was this transition. And then you discover that there are some things that you cannot write and can only capture. Whatever you write, there is the magic of actually capturing a moment, a face, an expression, a bit of light, a movement—and you really discover that while making films. You discover that those are the things that really elevate a scene on the page to the next level. I’d never assisted anybody before, so I wanted to be sure that what I did was grammatically correct. I wanted to be accepted or rejected for the content and not for the spelling and grammatical errors.

When something in a set of sequences is in itself elevating, you don’t need a song to elevate it further. When the scenes are doing the job, you don’t need a song.

Every aspect that you present to the public should be in sync with the film’s vision, so you make sure that all outputs—whether a still or a blow-up or a font or a design—represent something about the film. It is a way of knowing what the film is all about. It’s a slice of the whole product. That’s the only way you can have a cohesive product. If you are a film viewer, the first thing you notice is the title and the next thing is the first visual that you see. Whether or not you consciously observe the titles and the designs and the font, it makes an impact. That’s why some posters become classics.

When you have a smaller role—very less in terms of screen time but crucial to the narrative of the film—and when you don’t have film-time to establish the character, a certain amount of star quality helps. You have a presence that is pre-established, and it helps to make the character memorable. The character becomes a consolidated impression of what Kanchana is, and her screen history gives it a certain weight and strength.

In Nayakan, we’re just trying to look at what has been classified, very broadly, as bad, and trying to see if there’s anything inside it, and we’re trying to do this by exploring the life of the character. It is more difficult to make a movie about a pure hero—someone who is all white. That is unreal. That is a statue, an icon, and not a character. I think there are flaws in everybody, including the audience, and if you have a character that is flawed, there is something you identify with. He looks real because he has elements which are not perfect, and that’s true of 99 per cent of the people who live in this world. These characters don’t come from a comic book, someplace where people are only good and always do extraordinary things. Character flaws make a person more believable. When you say a person is bad, what is good in the bad person becomes the story. ‘He is a good guy, but …’ The but is the story. Without the but, we really have nothing.

Action is just gratification. The promise of action is much more potent.

Songs and action are two beautiful tools that you have. You shouldn’t use them left, right and centre, but with style.

I think a film has to be good, regardless of how it is made. Just because something is personal and caters to a niche, it doesn’t become a good film. A lot of mediocre films get made under the name of art cinema. If you’re not trying to communicate to a large number of people, that’s fine. But the ones made for the niche audience should still hold water. The content and form should be good enough. If I get a story that I want to tell and if it demands that kind of niche treatment, then I would do it. But I feel that if you want to share an idea or an issue that’s probably relevant, probably serious, there’s more reason for it to reach more people. The mainstream approach, sharing it with as many people as possible, will serve it more. That’s the path I have chosen. I am a product of mainstream cinema. I’ve liked mainstream cinema all my life. And I don’t think mainstream cinema needs to be stupid. I think it can have the sensibility of the so-called serious cinema and still remain connected to a large audience. It doesn’t have to be abstract for the sake of abstraction. It doesn’t have to be intellectualized for the sake of intellectualization. It can just be a sharing, a communication, a conversation with a large group of people.

If the content is something they are able to connect to, and if the form is something that helps this communication, then I think it should be okay.

Godard did a great favour to all film-makers by destroying this need for a step-by-step narration. If a man has to go from point A to point B, it is no longer necessary to show him getting out from point A, getting into a car, and driving and reaching point B. He taught us to cut straight in. He gave the audience the credit of putting the obvious together.

RANGAN : I can’t help noticing that you’ve been clutching a bunch of pencils through this entire session. RATNAM : Are you trying to find meaning in the pencils too? That’s the trouble with critics, reading into things that are not there. Well, I write with pencils. I use my laptop as long as I’m writing in English, till I get to the dialogue stage. And if it’s a Hindi film, I write the dialogues too in English. But when I write in Tamil, I prefer writing in longhand, with pencils. I can’t key in Tamil at a decent speed. RANGAN : Well, critics do tend look beyond the film-maker’s professed intentions. I prefer to trust the tale rather than the teller. But more importantly, while speaking to reticent film-makers, you have to be shameless and ask all kinds of questions, in the hope that at least some of the answers will yield gold. RATNAM : Hah. The price of gold is coming down.

I saw a bit of Dayavan [the Nayakan remake]. I didn’t get past the childhood portions. I think it was the point where the kid was trapped into betraying his father; I’m not sure, but if I see the film again, I can point it out. They didn’t get the point at all. Feroz Khan came here before he was to do the film, and I felt I had to tell him how I would go about it and then leave it to him. To me, Nayakan is the story of a man going to an alien zone and establishing roots and becoming somebody in that territory. It is really an underdog’s conquest in an alien zone. So for the Hindi version to root the story in Bombay was itself odd. I said I would have either set it in Calcutta, or even in London. He had a different perspective. He felt that the identification with Varadaraja Mudaliar was the key to the entire thing, whereas I thought the key, the story, was really about the alien man making it. That was the emotional chord. We differed, so I said fine, and we left it at that.

BARADWAJ RANGAN: The problems with the censors ended up defining the film for a while. What are your views on censorship? MANI RATNAM: I think censorship is very old-fashioned. It can’t be taken away overnight. I don’t think we are responsible enough to take on the burden just now. But I think that’s where we should head. What’s the practice in other media should come into films too—there should be some kind of self-regulatory mechanism. You can’t have acts written long ago by the British stop Indians from making films today.

RANGAN: I was talking to a film-maker recently, and he said one of the problems with Indian actors is that they rarely know how to enter and exit a scene, keeping in mind a future or past event in their character trajectory. He said everything has to be spelt out. ‘I think Bombay is visually one of my best films.’ Mani Ratnam directs Arvind Swamy. RATNAM: I think the problem is more with the directors. We don’t give actors the full script. We don’t give them enough time to live with the script. We tell them we’ll give them a narration; then we bring them to the set and tell them this is the scene, and then we tell them what happened before and after. It is the way we make films here. In the West, they know the complete script. They come in and do readings. In India, some of them have started doing it just because Hollywood does it. But to be honest, even in the West, there are people who make films with non-professionals, with non-actors, and they have made brilliant films with brilliant performances. So there’s no single method. If Iranian films and some Tamil films can get performances from people picked from the street, if Bharathiraja can make so many fresh faces act, I don’t see what difference it makes what method you use—whether they know the entire script or they know only the moment. Because the process is so subjective, so open, people in the West tend to convert it into a system—so that they can do some training. It is good, but it’s not the only way. This is a ...

RANGAN: What is your attitude towards messages in movies? RATNAM: I don’t make movies to give messages. Films are about sharing an experience or sharing your angst or your concerns about something with a larger group of people. If the film gives you an experience and if it puts you in another person’s shoes, and you become aware of that person or that issue through the film, then I think it’s doing its job. It’s a convenience to think that your film has a message and that’s why people are seeing it. There are so many inputs in life that come from different factions. Films are just one of them. You can’t give yourself too much credit saying that films influence people. I think that people are influenced only if they want to be influenced, and more importantly, only if they are already predisposed towards what you’re saying. A message can only make a film the flavour of the month. I don’t meet people on the road and say, ‘I have a message for you.’ Why would I do that on film?

If you take the appreciation, you should also be able to take the criticism when they don’t accept the film.

In any relationship, there’s one phase where you don’t take the other person for granted, and therefore you’re at your best. Then, the moment the other person is within your grasp, you change without realizing it. You start taking them for granted. And sometimes the relationship re-forms in a different way. That was the theme Alaipaayuthey tried to deal with.

I’ve always felt that someone better than me should be doing that job. If there is a cameraman, he should be better than me—then I can get something extra out of him, not just what I’d do. If I need someone to do exactly what I want him to do, I just need an assistant. Once you have an intelligent mind that is on the same page, the chances of having a synergetic effect are much higher. I can bring something and he can bring something, and we can put things together and reach a plane higher than the one we would have reached individually.

THERE ARE TWO THINGS that bother a film-maker. One, when he is offered a lifetime achievement award. The second is when he is asked to do a book on his films. Both invariably mean that the sell-by date is round the corner, or worse, that it has passed.