Satisfying the mass and the class

FILM MAKER Saran, who gave the hit "Amarkkalam" talks about the travails of transcending the beaten track:

No doubt about it, Mani Ratnam's entry revolutionised film making in the country. Even the way he starts his films is unorthodox, unpredictable. He broke the prevailing conventions of structure and form. Or, let us say - he created his own rules.

Mani Ratnam has become such a yardstick today that any departure or novelty is connected to the changes he wrought in our perception of this visual medium. I have been in this field for ten years, three of them as director. Yet, when I make a film, I can't help wondering how Mani Ratnam would have approached every scene in it! Younger film makers like me long to do something creative, leave an imprint on what we make. Unfortunately, we get little support from the audience for experiments. How can we evolve a better cinema without taking some risks? But we have to ensure that enough masala is provided by fight and dance scenes, whether or not if they are necessary to the theme on hand. There are lots of people who come only to watch such riotous explosions on the screen. Nor can you afford to relax the pace to suit the different moods in your story. If you do, you may lose audience attention. And unless you do something different from what TV does, you can't get them into the theatres in the first place.In the past films drew in an educated as well as a mass audience. Today we have mostly the latter. But we do have to try to satisfy both bench and balcony - which have diametrically opposite needs!

Nor does the present climate permit survival after a single failure, whereas in the past, directors with two or three flops in tow could recover with a reasonable hit.You'd think that the revolutionary technical advances in film making are a boon to us. Not so. They demand much more from the crew, in effort and expenditure. It's like riding the tiger, you never know what to expect.

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Section  : Entertainment
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