Conversations with Mani Ratnam

by Baradwaj Rangan

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.