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Two Indians Abroad

An Interview with Producer Bharathan Kandaswamy
&
Writer-Director Mani Ratnam

by Anup Sugunan

Roja (1992) , one of the ground-breaking films in Indian Cinema is the brainchild of writer/director, Mani Ratnam. Producer Bharathan Kandaswamy was learning the ropes on that film who now has worked on over 40 films to date. Mani Ratnam has gone on to write and direct many other groundbreaking and chart breaking films including, Bombay, Dil Se (first Indian film to enter the UK Top 10), and his latest festival favorite, Kannathil Muthamittal aka A Peck on the Cheek. I had the pleasure of interviewing these two gentlemen to gain an understanding of the largest film industry in the world, India and compare it with filmmaking here in the states.

Arvind Swamy and Madhoo in the title role of Roja.

Filmmaker Interviews: What is the first film that made you really interested in filmmaking?

Bharathan Kandaswamy: I’ve been watching films from the age of eight. I’ve always enjoyed most of the films that I had seen, which were Tamil films in the beginning. Then I got to seeing other films as well. But the ones that I grew up with are the [actor] MGR films. I think the film that really made me sit up was a movie called, Ulagam Sutrum Valiban. This means ‘young man who goes around the world’. That was a film in which MGR acted. That single film had a richness and poshness as far as filmmaking goes. It had locales in Japan, Singapore, parts of Hawaii and so on. It was a big-budget film. But I’ve also enjoyed a lot of other art movies made by people like Mr. Balachander, Mr. Sreedar, Tilok Chanderan. They made highly artistic and highly sensitive films in the genre of family drama. So, I grew up on that menu of films. And so that is what created the interest in filmmaking for me. I grew up in a family which loves movies.

FI: Were your parents involved in filmmaking?

BK: My father is a retired official of the government of India. He worked in Customs and Central Excise in South India. He used to get transferred to various locations so I also moved around as a child. I spent my childhood in different cities in South India, but then most of the time in Tamil Nadu. My mom is a housewife. I’m the eldest in the family and I have one younger brother who is living in the Middle East in Dubai and a younger sister who married and settled in Chennai too.

FI: Were either of them in the film industry?

BK: Neither one of them are in the movies. However, the entire family loves movies, but I’m the only one who got into the business of movie making.

FI: So, tell me about your first step into the film industry.

BK: Well, it was an accident – what I call as a happy accident. My background is basically graduate business school. I did my MBA from one of the top business schools in Ahmedabad [Gujarat, India] called the Indian Institute of Management back in 1978. It had collaboration with Harvard in those days.

I never imagined that I was going to get into the film industry. At that time, I was actually working for multi-nationals. In 1984, I got married to the daughter of a very prominent and well-known film director, Mr. K. Balachander, who was very popular at that time. I actually had been an admirer and fan of his movies. So I never imagined that I’d get married to his daughter one day. [Laughs] That in fact helped stimulate my interest in the business side of filmmaking as well.

In 1989, I actually got into the family film business and became an executive producer first to learn the ropes of filmmaking and how it was all done. That gave me an opportunity to interact very closely with creative people, like directors, cinematographers, technicians, and the artists and the actors and… here I am.

FI: How many films did you work on as an executive producer?

BK: I did about five films as an executive producer. Worked with some of the big stars like Mr. Rajinikanth, Ms. Mena and Ms. Simeran. Roja was one of the films that we worked on.

FI: You were an executive producer on Roja?

BK: I was not an executive producer on Roja, but it was at the early stages for me at that time. So I was involved in assisting the executive producer at that time, a person by the name of Mr. Natarajan. Our company was very professionally run. So even though we were part of the family, we really grew up to learn the ropes.

FI: What are the job descriptions of the executive producer vs. the producer?

BK: A producer is one who actually puts together the entire production. Typically, in India, the way it works is that the directors come in with the script and they look for producers to finance the movie and get the movie under production. An executive producer is an in-house producer who actually coordinates the entire process. Because many times, the producer is like the owner of the company and he or she will not be on the day-to-day production. But they would be available if required. But the executive producer will on the set every day. He would also have to plan and coordinate the entire production process. Make sure the resources are available; make sure the artists get right from basics to transportation, to food, to locales. The executive producer is responsible for everything.

FI: Which is interesting because I think here executive producer primarily deals with the finances and the producer deals with the other tasks… it’s almost the flip opposite.

BK: In the US, so does it mean that the executive producer here is kind of responsible for the finances of the movie only?

FI: Yeah.

BK: Oh, I see, interesting.

FI: Actually, I’m going to do more research on this, usually, from my understanding, the executive producers deals with the money and other business issues. But, when the movie gets Best Picture at the Academy Awards, producers are the ones who get to go up and get the Oscar.

BK: Even back home in India it’s pretty much similar, it’s the producer who can go on stage and gets the titles and the credits. The executive producer does get a credit because he is doing a lot of the real work the so-called “dirty” work.

FI: So, now talking once again about shifting over from executive to producer. Which film was that?

BK: That happened with a film called Mutu. It is a film directed by Ravi Kumar in 1995. Since then I have been fully involved as a producer of many films. From 1995, our company produced at least 2 movies per year. One would be a high budget film, typically a million dollar plus kind of movie. The other would be a low to medium budget, which will be more of an artistic kind of thing.

FI: What about your role in terms of picking the script, getting the writers. What is that process like for you?

BK: We have a lot of very young creative scriptwriters back home. The way it works is we have some in-house writers as well. These are people who are practically employed to write scripts for the company. They come up with a script every two months. Then we screen the scripts and we review all the scripts through a committee. Once we do the review we decide this is the one we want to make into a movie. That decision is based upon a committee that takes into account the marketing aspects of the script, what kind of casting is most appropriate, whether we will be able to get the stars in time to get the production started quickly. These factors will determine whether a particular script is accepted for fitting into production.

FI: In Indian movies, I see that the screenwriter has a credit and the dialog writer has a different credit. So, someone who writes the dialog is different from the screenwriter?

BK: In most situations they would be the same. See, in screenwriting in India, we have what is called a screenplay, which is actually breaking the script down into situations and having a scene-by-scene dialog. A dialog I suppose in many cases is a dialog writer who assists the screenplay writer- the visualizer in terms of specific aspects of the script.

FI: The interaction between writers?

BK: Exactly. In most cases we find that the script writer and the dialog writers are the same person. And the chairman of our company, Mr. Balachander, writes his own scripts. He’s a writer-director, which gives his movies have a certain advantage because he is able to bring the exact feel he wants But certain aspects of the script he does consult some of the script writers so to get certain emphasis on the words or to get emphasis on certain parts of the dialog.

FI: Now, what would you say is the percentages of people who write and direct versus just writing or just directing in the movies you have produced?

BK: Well, in the movies that we have produced it’s been almost 80% of people who have written and directed themselves. But only of late, the trend is in the last 5-6 years we find that the scriptwriter is not the same person who is directing the film. In fact most of the times the scriptwriters would ideally like to direct the movies themselves, but the skills are quite different.

FI: One is verbal, one is visual.

BK: One is visual, yes.

FI: Now, do you nurture your scriptwriters to become directors or do they have to go out on their own become a director?

BK: We certainly try to nurture them. We try to look at the skills. Our company has been known to introduce and experiment with new directors. Even recently, we made a movie called Al—it’s a Tamil film. We introduced a very young director – a 20-year-old guy. Who had served as an assistant to earlier successful films. He got a break through our company. So, we do nurture young directors because we always believe in introducing fresh talent.

The only way the film industry evolves is by constant evolution of new stories, new ideas, new artists and talents, new directors, new perspectives. It is said that there are only 9 teams in the whole world, nine kinds of story lines. Every story is a variation of how you look at that. The innovation comes in the way you structure the treatment of the film.

FI: So, as a beginning filmmaker, what are some of the mistakes as well as the good approaches when coming to a big producer?

BK: Okay. Well the first mistake could be that you should not appear too eager to- you’re referring from the perspective of the director not the perspective of a screenwriter wanting to be a director, right?

FI: Let’s do both perspectives.

BK: If you have a script, and if you are very sure you want to direct the movie yourself, I think it is very important that you have you go with a particular pilot shot for even for 3-4 minutes. Choose one particular scene that is very powerfully done instead of just explaining the story if you can. Today, digital cameras are so easy, you can very inexpensively produce 3-5 minutes of your own story on a digital camera and show the work, your creativity to a producer. So, he gets a first hand feel of your visualization and your creative abilities rather than just telling a story you know verbose for about an hour. Which most of the directors try to do. So, we encourage new directors to come and show us visually what they are capable of. This is important for a first time director. If you already have a movie or two on the back, you can just show that.

FI: But once without any movies?

BK: Yes, for those, you need to have something to show. The second is also to be able to explain the story in a very convincing and very powerful dramatic way. So you need to become almost an actor yourself when the story is told. So many times people miss out on a great story because they are not very dramatic about it.

FI: That’s very interesting to know, so really get into it and act out the lines, the crucial lines.

BK: Yeah, you almost act out the crucial lines and that really has an effect. The dramatic impact of telling a great story is more convincing because most of the time you must remember that producers are listening to many stories from different people and they get bored. So how do you get the producer to listen to your story the more keenly? You have to do something different.

Also in the first movie, be very flexible; convince the producer that you will try to be as cost effective as possible because the producer is always worried about the bottom line, you know. So they are always looking for a director who can think like a producer, who doesn’t think from the other side of the fence- you know saying that “I need this, I need that.”

FI: Basically thinking that he’s funding the whole project.

BK: Exactly, it’s like making the director think like a producer, stepping in the shoes of the producer and thinking like him helps a lot. If you can give that impression to your producer that you are, in India we call them producer-directors that means that they are producer-friendly directors as opposed to directors who insist on getting what they want.

FI: I want a crane I want a helicopter!

BK: Right, we want the bird flying there; you know, that kind of a thing.

FI: Okay, actually lets segue on that topic. What where do you see are the biggest faults with first time directors? Where do the costs rise in terms of production when a director says I want this and that, what usually happens that shoots the budget up?

BK: Well, in many situations it is the director’s own ability to understand the implication of what he is trying to do. So, if a director has got this perspective and cares, he has the ability to control the costs in very good ways. So this comes with experience as well it also comes out of an implicit understanding of trying to make do with an available budget. So you must understand the medium very well. A director’s understanding of the medium helps him to cut costs in many ways. So it doesn’t just have to do with the talent or something like that. Sometimes it’s even identifying which talent is critical for your movie and making do with some talent. But being able to getting a great job of acting done by them at maybe 30% of the costs of a big star. And then there are day-to-day situations like in locales in trying to work. We call this matching or cheating. When I say cheating, it’s make-believe because the whole film industry is all make-believe. So it’s how effectively you can make-believe on a budget is the strength of the director.

FI: Now, you also shoot nonlinearly relative to the script, so say you have the same sequence that come out at different times, you’ll shoot all those in one shot.

BK: Right. Sometimes the climax could be shot at the very beginning. So it’s a question of how you write you the sequence of your screenplay. Also, make sure that your production scheduling is done properly because that can also help in reducing the cost. This where in India we use a lot of production, what we all assistant directors – so we have assistant directors who only looks at continuity, we have an assistant director for locations, we have an assistant director for casting and helping the director to explain the scenes and so on. We have an assistant director to take care of production coordination – making sure costumes and other things are required down the line, set properties, and everything is made available. It is very important to have some good assistants who can help you on these things.

In India, of course, there are more people so we have sometimes 5 or 6 assistant directors, but maybe a couple of them are really learning, but they are still called assistant directors because most of the time they could be a friend of the director who wants to learn something. The director just allows him to get involved and he needn’t be necessarily paid a big amount, of course the producers do pay him something because he is working, but he’s not working just for the money he wants to understand the experience.

FI: Okay now coming back to a beginning filmmaker who has no contacts with the industry: that seems to be a huge thing. This industry is all about contacts right?

BK: Sure.

FI: Say he watches whatever, Khabi Kushi, Kahbi Gam and gets really inspired and says, “Oh I want to make a film.” What would you recommend for him to do if he wants to write and direct?

BK: He wants to make a big film, you mean?

FI: Eventually, but wherever he can start.

BK: I think the best way for getting into the film business as a director is to become a production assistant and then become an assistant director. Work as an assistant director for at least 2 or 3 films. That is what I recommend because that way you learn the ropes...

FI: ...and the timing of the set...

BK: …and the timing. You learn the aspects, which can go wrong, which can affect the timing of a film, which can affect the budgets. You can also get use to being yelled at which is very important in the film industry. So that way is the best way to learn.

FI: Now, what are some things that make the timing go wrong?

BK: There could be many things, I’m not talking major things. Certainly a well-planned production basically eliminates the possibility of things going wrong, because it’s a people oriented industry. You have so many people coming together everyday to make it happen and it’s not like working on a computer in-office where you can put in the extra two hours and get the job done. Here everybody has to be synchronized into the act. You know that way you have to be a little flexible on time.

And also it’s a creative process. In the creative process you cannot put down in an industrial engineering kind of time frame. Sometimes you have to allow a certain amount of time for things to get synchronized. For example, lets say you take a new artist. A new artist working opposite a very established artist is going to get intimidated in the beginning. So, the director has to show a greater amount of understanding and patience to get the job done. He must act as the bridge between the established actor and the new talent. So who knows if this new talent added 24:29 to the film could make a big difference to his movie or it could be a child artist who needs a lot of patience or it could be sometimes dealing with animals. So, the chance of this industry is different with every project. Every project is different, so while the profess is something that you can easily understand and make a knowledge base out it at the same time you could always be learning new lessons in new projects.

FI: So what about you, any interest in directing? Do you write at all?

BK: I do write some stories. I give a lot of dialogs to the established screenwriters, I’m not a big screenwriter myself, but I chip in with a lot of elements of the story. My dream is to direct one big film myself.

FI: When does it look like it’s going to happen?

BK: I don’t know. Maybe two years from now. Maybe a crossover film

FI: So, now you’re trying to bring Roja to the US Market. There seems to be of course a new cross of American Chai and American Desi's are popping up. There have been a couple of films that have tried to do where they bring it over from India but it is not as successful. Now Roja is a very successful film in India and now you’re bringing it over. You want to go on a theatrical run…how?

BK: Well, I believe Roja is such a powerful film and so topical today. Well today it must go theatrical, it must go all over, but at the same time we are to see the market-realities because we want to understand that it maybe a good idea to put it as a home video as well because DVD I believe is becoming a big factor in the US.

FI: It’s huge.

BK: OK, it’s huge and even when the rest of the US economy was not doing so well, I believe DVD sales have been really good for the last 2 years. Also, DVD players have become so affordable. So, maybe we have opportunities to make it big on home video and also on cable and television. You know the cost of going to a theatrical release is quite prohibitive in terms of promotion and P&A [film Prints & Advertising], but we haven’t decided yet. If we get a big enough distributor we might just go ahead with distribution.

FI: Now, how was the distribution when it was distributed in India?

BK: In India we have an established set of distributors who’ll take each movie. We work with almost the same set of people because of the established relationships with them. So, even if they do well on a particular movie, they are happy to back and buy the next one. And if a movie doesn’t do so well or it flops, then we kind of compensate for the next film so our relationship is built over a period of time, which works. But in America we are still new to the system here so we have to feel the waters and see how it goes.

FI: What do you see are the biggest differences between the Indian Cinema scene versus the America Cinema Scene? Have you noticed anything?

BK: Are you asking in terms of production, or in terms of distributing, or marketing…

FI: Everything, whatever. Because primarily they’re both Entertainment Industry they should be similar, but

BK: They’re very different actually.

FI: Right so what do you see are the big differences.

BK: Well, I think the biggest differences are in the ways the films are marketed. See, in India a lot of attention is given to producing a movie, but not enough attention and money is spent on packaging and marketing a film. For historical reasons, most of the marketing work has been taken up by the distributors and not as much with the producer in India. But here [in the US], the producer is equally involved. The studio assistants make sure about that.

The other major difference is the role of the electronic media in promoting a film. I think in America the role of the electronic media is extremely critical…

FI: You mean the Internet?

BK: …the Internet, television. When I mean electronic media it’s the television as well. Millions of dollars I believe are spent on trailers and putting promotions on TV.

FI: Right, very expensive.

BK: It’s very expensive.

FI: A single slot of a 30 second ad during the Super Bowl is 2 million dollars.

BK: Wow! In India we can make 2 movies for that cost. [Laughs]

FI: Actually I found that to be interesting what John Delaverson [a VP, from Lions Gate Films] said [during the 'Business of Films' seminar at the Palm Springs Film Festival] something to the like of “We don’t care how cheap the movie looks, we still have to pay the same amount to get it out there to be honest. You could make a movie for $20,000 or $200,000 still the P&A costs will be about the same for both. So, we don’t really care if you can make a cheap movie. To get it out to the public you got to spend the same amount of money.”

BK: So, the differences are quite startling in terms of advertising, promotion, packaging, having a lot more importance given to P&A here than in India. Also in India we find the technology of finishing a movie is still different. A lot more importance is given to special effects and technology of lighting and so on than in India. In India, more emphasis played on the story itself and the acting is more emotional. Most of the movies there are based on emotions. Were as in Hollywood, it’s based on technology and special effects rather than pure emotions. There are always exceptions to this but I’m talking of the general you know.

FI: Now you said going back to the beginning filmmaker, what would be different for somebody who wants to just write, just do screenplays?

BK: Well, I think if somebody just wants to focus on writing he has a great future because he can just concentrate and focus his skills on creating top quality scripts and he is not having the pressure of directing, visualizing this whole thing. I don’t know if you were at the screenwriters forum [at Palm Springs International Film Festival – with panelists: Ted Tally, Christopher Nolan, Amy Holden Jones].

FI: Yes, I was.

BK: There are a lot of frustrations that screenwriters can go through as well, which was well explained. And that there are no differences between what is happening in India and what is happening in America or anywhere in the world. I think the kind of frustrations that screenwriters can go through are the same, but then the advantage is that they can keep moving from movie to movie. I mean like it’s like a lyricist, I mean you can write thousands of songs in a movie and you do not worry how the songs are actually picturized, visualized. Of course, if they are done very well, people are going to give you credit for the good lyrics as well. So, it cuts both ways. But if you are a screenwriter-cum-director then there is a lot of hard work to do. The downside of it is you can always get carried away by more of the visual aspects than the words themselves.

FI: And now one thing that I noticed in terms of visualization versus dialog: I’ve noticed that there’s a lot more visualizations in American cinema. They’ll try and do more visualization without dialog. Do you think just culturally different or…

BK: Yeah, I think that it’s culturally different. Generally Indians are more talkative, okay? So you see that being reflected in the movies as well. And Indians also by cultural- we have to explain what we mean so there is always a repetition; there is more emphasis given to understanding the text and understanding words. Therefore, a lot of words are used in Indian movies even at the cost of repeating oneself. So, it’s again a function of the culture itself. But there are filmmakers in India who use fewer words and more action and more visualization to get the message across.

FI: Now would that be considered arthouse or do you see that happening at all in the mainstream?

BK: I think in mainstream Indian cinema is moving more like foreign and Hollywood films. It will come to a stage where there will be more visualization rather than action and less use of words. Even if you take a movie like Roja, there was very little dialog. There were a lot of messages being conveyed by just the situations by the eyes of Arvind Swamy, the hero, he shows his acute displeasure of what’s going on by his own action and by his own expression. Where as his wife is much more verbal because she has to make herself understood because she doesn’t know the language of Kashmir, which is Hindi where as she comes from a South Indian environment. So she had to talk more in order to get herself understood when her concerns and worries were about getting her husband away. To get across that message required her to talk much more. Where as Arvind Swamy as a captive was talking much less, but showing his expressions.

FI: How did you get involved with Mani Ratnam?

BK: Mani has always felt that Mr. Balachander is his guru because he has grown up on Mr. Balachander ‘s films. And he wanted to make a film as a tribute to Mr. Balachander for our company. And he submitted three scripts and Roja was selected and it made history. So that is how we got close to Mani Ratnam. He is a great filmmaker, very perceptive, understands the medium very well and uses the medium very effectively to convey a message.

FI: And how was it working with him?

BK: It was great. Just loved it- a producer-friendly director. He could really work on a budget.

FI: And how many films have you worked on with him?

BK: It was mainly Roja. We have remained good friends, but after Roja, he got into his own film company. So he started making more movies for himself.

FI: So he was a producer/writer first?

BK: Yeah, he’s a producer also for his own films today, which means he’s got a company, which makes films, which he directs. Like George Lucas.

FI: Right, completely independent.

BK: Independent, completely independent filmmaker. So Mani Ratnam is the same.

FI: Oh yeah, here are the questions that I have from writers on the set. Here, writers in film are the lowest on the totem pole, but writers in TV are the highest so how is it in India? Would you say it’s very comparable?

BK: Well, I think it’s quite comparable. The writer has to work closely with the director and he should be quite open to getting some of his lines modified, chopped off, whatever you call it as long as the spirit of what he was conveying is intact because generally most of the writer are more textual, they are very good authors, but writing a script for a movie requires you to use less words. You have to be more crisp in your dialects and use less words. Generally you will find even the screenwriters tend to use more words in the beginning so directors really tried to work on modifying the lines. They don’t do it just for the heck of it. They do it if they think it’s really necessary.

And because movie making is such and interesting creative process a good involved actor can also come and improvise something on the set, which might really look good. I mean it has happened to many of our films. We have made a lot films with Kamal Hassan, who’s a great actor and he doesn’t just mouth the lines just like that. So, he will come up to the director and say “Sir, why don’t we do this, doesn’t this sound better?” and he’ll come up with a line which might actually sound much better than the director has written. So it depends on of course the level of the actor and his willingness to improvise and get involved. Of course not every actor would like to come and change the line. He has to have a certain clout and he must have established himself in order to be able to for the director to listen to him, he must be somebody.

FI: And the other question was concerning unions and guilds, do you have them?

BK: Oh, yes.

FI: So you’ll have the director’s unions and…?

BK: There is no business without unions.

FI: In India?

BK: Yeah, but they are very understanding they have their own associations. Sometimes they could be pretty obstinate, but we’ve not had serious problems. The industry is always able to work with the unions

FI: Any closing words?

BK: Well there’s no business like show biz. Of course, we have to understand that technology is making a lot of impact and culturally the markets are getting closer together and I think that’s a great challenge for this industry. So, lets have fun.

A Breif Chat with Mani Ratnam

Filmmaker Interviews: I read that you came to a realization when you were in your teens that movies were actually "conceived and directed". Can you break down that single moment in time in terms or your thought process of when you switched from being a watcher to a maker? Did you see it and think, "Wow, that was great. I'd love to make something like that." Or was it something like, "That was horrible, I can do better than that, so I will!"?

Mani Ratnam: As a kid when you watch films, one assumes that the lines belong to the artists who perform. Slowly you realise that they are performing someone else's lines by making it their own. Similarly you think that it is a story that you are watching till you see something special in certain movies and go back to realise that there has been one brain behind these films that you have liked. That is when you become aware of the maker or at least that was what I went through. From that moment, it has been a bit of both the scenarios - "Wow, that was great. I'd love to make something like that." and "That was horrible, I can do better than that. More of the later but certainly quiet a few of the former."

FI: I really admire the jumping in head first mentality you took afterwards instead of wanting to intern or anything else. Do you think that is still possibly nowadays? If so, how should one go about doing it?

MR: Well the same way - just jump. Get a film any which way you can and then go about doing it the like there is no tomorrow.

FI:What do you think of the term "Bollywood"? I get a feeling of unoriginality every time I hear it. It's as if India can't come up with something on their own. India is very influential in terms of filmmaking with so many western films paying homage to Indian cinema. What do you think about that labeling?

MR: I think it is awful. BOLLYWOOD - just awful. Every curator and every [festival] programmer keep telling you that it has given an address to Indian films, but I think it is the wrong address. What is wrong with INDIAN FILMS - when Iranian films and Chinese films did not need this kind of an awful label why put it on to Indian films?

Filmmaker Interviews regrets to inform that unfortunately due to
time and schedule constraints, this interview was truncated.

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