Conversations with Mani Ratnam

by Baradwaj Rangan

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 ...