Conversations with Mani Ratnam

by Baradwaj Rangan

Naan paadum mouna raagam was my homage to Pyaasa, a lost poet alone in an auditorium, with only his poetry and his past.

Karthika accuses Kamal of being evil, but he never really comes across that way. Similarly, in Guru, whose protagonist is a lot like Velu Nayakan, Madhavan calls Abhishek Bachchan a beemari, a sickness of society, and you think that this moral judgement will begin to colour Abhishek’s character. But that doesn’t happen. Abhishek comes across more like a lovable crook than a cause of society’s rot. Our sympathies are with Kamal and Abhishek. Even though these characters are being indicted by Madhavan and Karthika, they are not being indicted by the movies themselves (and by extension, by the audience). What purpose, then, does this opposing point of view (put into the mouths of major supporting characters) serve?

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.

even as I struggle to get ready for my next shoot, I realize that, at the beginning, when I started my first film, if someone had offered me these twenty-odd films as my body of work up to this point, I would have accepted them happily. But now that I have struggled and toiled my way here, when I look back, I tend to take the good parts for granted, and look at the rest of it and wonder: if only …