Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When Kamal Haasan did 'Nayakan,' he had done a few roles that had him aged and demanded a lot of commitment from. He was already a veteran and a master.
Art is something in which you are never an expert at any point of time. It's something you hone all the time and something which is elusive all the time.
What you write sets the visual style for the film. But you have to compromise your style in your first few films before people let you do what you want to do.
In school I was sidelined by Tamil language teachers. But in the film industry, I got interested in Tamil poetry after reading and working with the Vairamuthu.
I don't watch my old films like 'Roja,' 'Dil Se' because I only see mistakes. I see five minutes of the film and I am scared I will start finding mistakes in them.
Roja,' 'Bombay' and 'Dil Se' weren't planned as political films. It was a phase India was going through and these things affected me and found their way into my work.
I am not against songs in films. We come from an oral tradition of storytelling. I have grown up listening to epics in oral rendition and oral rendition always had music.
Any good film you see gives you enough motivation and adrenaline rush to produce good content, while a bad film can get you so angry that you produce even better content.
What I feel is great acting might be rubbish for another filmmaker. There is no right or wrong way to do it. It all boils down to the trust between an actor and a director.
If you look at any film fest, the setting gives it colour. Be it Goa, Cannes or even Berlin in the winter, the setting makes these festivals special and gives it a definition.
Language, I think, has nothing to do with film-making. It is how you make your point and whether you exploit the visual medium maintaining a certain standard that does the trick.
I always look for genuineness. If I feel I can connect with the audience, I will try to develop it. For example, the genesis of 'Kannathil Muthamittal' was an article published in a magazine.
I don't believe that to be mainstream you have to be foolish. I don't think you have to be a buffoon to sell. I think you can be logical, aesthetic and still work within the mainstream format.
Sometimes in a large family, you get taken to a movie and there just isn't enough space or not enough tickets and you get left out. Those are the movies you remember because you never got to see them!
Within the mainstream cinema, I feel you can experiment and make sensible films. It's possible to tell a story with characters and emotions which are real, genuine, and which need not be over the top.
When it comes to casting for movies, it is a priority that you cast right. The guiding principle must be what is right for the movie, that is the basis you cast someone, not because so-and-so is a friend.
The fact that technology has developed so much gives you the liberty to tell the stories, which were difficult to say earlier. It allows you to tell it more convincingly, more elaborately and more beautifully.
If you ask a filmmaker to analyse his own film, it would take three or four years to do that, honestly. Because when you make a film, you have to be convinced about it. You are married to that film for a year.
Unfortunately scripts don't chase me. I chase them. I struggle, battle, discard, pick it back, struggle further, plead with it, curse it, cajole and try to be clever. But it is invariably the script that rules.
It doesn't matter which genre you're working in, you try to find an honest relationship within that space, and say if it's the romance genre, within that you have to find a story and characters that resonate with an audience.
With each film, you are still trying to get the length and measure right. And failure is all about others' perception of you. When you have one success, they think you know it all. But if you fail, they think they know it all.
It is usually the setting that decides whether a movie can be made in two languages. If the subject is rooted up North, then I make it in Hindi. But if the subject is common, then I am open to making the movie in multiple languages.
Most ideas remain inside you for a while. You tell somebody when there is a spark or a thought, and leave it at that. You come back later, write down a few lines. I makes note in my mind on whether it can be made into a film or not.
Actors are the most important. Performance is what matters. Nothing matters more than the actors; they have to perform. No one else can give life to the characters. Audiences must believe the characters as real and the moments as real.
Filmmaking is not a one man show. It is not like I'm thinking something and they are expressing it. I try to pull the actor in and together we try to get the expression. It is not my thinking alone, it is our thinking. The actor also becomes a part of the thought process.
Film fests are an opportunity to see different kinds of films that you usually don't get to watch. When I'm part of a jury, then I get to judge films, but otherwise I attend festivals to watch two or three films a day and network with a gathering of cinema lovers from all over.
I'm not saying that every song has to be an all-time hit or the greatest ever music. That's not what you should set out to do. But you have to find out what will work best for a particular story or theme or backdrop, and discuss how not to make it a cliche or fall into such traps.
I watch films, so I know what it is to be there in a theatre as the audience. So I always want to communicate with them when I make films, but that is not the only thing. I also want to say something which I feel deeply, and which I feel I can connect with the rest of the audience.
When I did my first film, I had a fair idea of what I liked and what I didn't while watching an actor in front of the camera. After I finished the film, I thought I had exhausted everything I knew. As I moved from one story, setting and character to another, I discovered something new.
Rahman is very very director friendly. He is ever ready to go whichever the director wants, the story wants, depending on the kind of movie or the music you want, and within that he finds his niche. It is a constantly complementary process. At the end of the day he is not pleasing you, he has to please himself.
If you take 'Agni Natchathiram,' it is about two half-brothers and their emotions and those are genuine, which can be made into a very hard-hitting film just that it can be presented in an entertaining fashion. Similarly with 'OK Kanmani,' it is a genuine film; it is not a flippant film just for commercial purposes.
Format is just the language. Content is the only thing that is important. Form is like handwriting. Whether you write in a scribble or clean handwriting or type it, the content remains the same. You want to write in clean hand, in a kind of a clear format only because it is aesthetically pleasing. I can scribble, that's also fine.
In a film like 'Kannathil Muthamittal,' I can't have a Rajnikanth or a Kamal Haasan. If you have a star, the expectation of the film is different. So, you cast according to the subject of the film. Some films are best done with stars because it gives you a base on which if you can get the correct performance, you can reach higher.
When you break new grounds and try to do something different, it's always a high. I remember the first time we did a whole song in slow motion with lipsync for 'Geetanjali.' It was not prevalent at that time. We just had a method and we tried to do that. We weren't sure whether it was going to work, but that is the kind of risk you take.
The journey of filmmaking is so amazing. You start off with great confidence, and develop insecurity at the time of release. When you are ready with the finished product, you are constantly wondering if you have been honest to the story you started out with, if you got what you wanted. One is too close to the project by then to be objective.