‘Ponniyin Selvan’ Director Mani Ratnam On Working With A.R. Rahman & Writing For Women: “We Should Invest Intelligence In Female Characters” – Mumbai Film Festival

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Leading Tamil filmmaker Mani Ratnam shared deep insights and filmmaking secrets from his illustrious 40-year career in a master class at Mumbai Film Festival, moderated by self-confessed fan and Hindi film director Imtiaz Ali.

In a standing room only session that lasted nearly two hours, the celebrated filmmaker started by talking about how he was working as a management consultant when the films of masters such as Akira Kurosawa, Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy inspired him to seek a career in cinema. “At that time, the only way you could become a director was to work as an assistant director with some big filmmaker – that would be a period of some seven or eight years and I was not patient enough for that,” Ratnam remembers.  “So I thought I’ll write a script, convince a director and learn everything about filmmaking that way.

But when I finished writing, I thought I’d direct myself even though I had no clue how to do it. And the only thing I learned very fast is that when you’re shooting, you have to pretend that you know.” Joking that he also suffers from imposter syndrome, Ali led Ratnam into talking about his first films in the early 1980s (which included one of Anil Kapoor’s first films, Kannada-language Pallavi Anu Pallavi) and an early encounter with leading Tamil actor-producer Kamal Haasan. “I pitched my first film story to Kamal and he listened politely and then told me three stories,” Ratnam recalled.  “He also told me something fairly significant – he said, ‘don’t aim at the heart, aim at the gut until you make it’.

In a sense, he was telling me to make something that a lot of people could identify with, don’t speak in a language they don’t understand.” Ratnam reinvented Tamil cinema throughout the 1980s, with