About awards
- To start with film-making is a tremendous team effort and the Director can be the only person to know who in the team is contributing what, as their work is being benchmarked against his vision and requirements.
- The irony for me is that after all the euphoria Indians had on Resul Pookutty winning an Oscar it does not even occur to them to ask what else he had done before this. It’s nothing to do with Resul’s contribution and my proof of that is I have not heard or met a single person who saw Slumdog and mentioned sound in particular until the time the Golden Globe gave him an award.
- There is a live effects track, a dialogue track, an atmospheric track and the background score track of which only a part is due to sound designer. All of these are made to come together by the final mixing engineer to create the desired effect sometimes in consultation with the Director and sometimes without. Any person who hears the final output of the mixed track has no way of knowing whose contribution to what degree is creating the desired effect. The only person who knows that will be the final mixing engineer who will be deciding what to keep, what to throw out and at what levels they have to be played.
- The attempt of mine here is not to undermine Resul’s work but it is to make one understand that Resul can do better work which easily can go unnoticed and lesser work can create an impact due to reasons unrelated to work.
- I have always maintained that my successful films are due to my team and my failures are due to me alone. The reason for that is that each and every actor and technician are contributing their work and talent as per my vision and in many cases they enhance it far greater than what I had expected. The success of a film is due to what contribution the actors and technicians gave in addition to what I expected of them and that is why it belongs to them and the failure of their equally great contribution belongs to me as I failed in channelizing it to its intended destination.
- It has to be realized that in the making of a film the technicians and actors are working towards satisfying the director, and the director is working towards satisfying the audience. So only by the sheer understanding of the mechanics I have of what goes into the making of a film, I find the concept of an outside body giving Awards ridiculous.
About A R Rahman
- When I happened to listen Roja’s songs at Mani Ratnam’s home, long before the film released, I was blown away with the sheer originality of the songs’ orchestration and tunes. I immediately wanted to sign him for a film I was making with Sanjay Dutt called Nayak, and for Rangeela. But my investors preferred Anu Malik, as they felt the success of the music of Roja’s dubbed version was a fluke, and that this kind of music would not work in Hindi. The very fact that A.R was not signed by any top Hindi filmmaker after Roja is proof-enough, they reasoned. They said that Anu Malik was at the top of his form after Baazigar, and that we would get a much bigger price for the audio.
- After telling him the story of Rangeela ... he went through the situations, the compositions he came up with used to surprise me, though not always pleasantly. That is because his tunes were so original in his interpretation of the emotion of a situation that a conventional ear will take time to let it sink in.
- A case in point is the Hai Rama song where my brief to him was that I wanted to shoot an erotic number... and I was subconsciously expecting him to come up with a tune, something on the likes of I Love You (Kaate Nahin Katthe Yeh Din Yeh Raat) in Mr. India. What he came up with was the Hai Rama tune, which sounded to me like some classical Carnatic raga, and my first reaction was that he had lost his head. But when I kept hearing it, it grew on me like an obsession, and I finally said that we will go ahead with the tune even though I was still unsure, deep inside, of how it would fit into the situation. But when he finished the entire track with the orchestration it was beyond my wildest imagination that an erotic song can be made to sound like that. He captured the intensity of the eroticism and the purity of its feeling in the beginning alaap, the cello themes, and through the wild tablaas which elevated the effect of the images I created, many times more than what they would have been otherwise.
- The moment they (many music directors) finish recording a song, most music directors forget about it and move on to whatever else they are doing. A.R invariably keeps revisiting his song and effecting changes onto them (Read it as sculpting and polishing). Until a time the tracks have to leave for the audio company, he treats each and every song of his like his own daughter whom he is preparing for a marriage with the listener.
- Also, A.R is the only artiste I have met who does not have creative arrogance. I mean that he never defends his work if it were to be criticized. He was recording The spirit of Rangeela theme in Chennai while I was shooting in Mumbai. When he sent the track to me I didn’t like it, at first hearing. Not just me but the entire unit didn’t. As I was playing the spirit theme in my car over and over again, at some moment it hit me like a thunder bolt, and I told him that I must have been out of my mind not to have liked it in the first place. He smiled and said “I knew you would like it eventually”.
- The aesthetics of his song tracks are beyond compare to any other music director’s. What I mean by aesthetics is, if the melody is the story, the various instruments and the way they are recorded, played, and their inter-volume levels and tones would be like art direction, cinematography etc.
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