Conversations with Mani Ratnam

by Baradwaj Rangan

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.