| Ram Gopal 的个人资料My Blog照片日志列表 |  工具  帮助 |
|
|
2009/6/4 AGYAAT Theatrical Trailor2009/5/8 Bharat Ko Bachaa Le Vidhaata!When was the last time a SONG stirred us to realize the reality of our current state?
When I was writing this song, I wanted to capture the emotions of a situation in the film where the citizens of India are asked to wake up; To wake up and realize that we are not being fair to the country by letting anti-national powers flourish for their personal gains, that we are surrendering the very freedom that we fought for, that we are dividing the country when we should actually stand up united for it’s progress.
Now, if we had used lines like “Jaag jao… Bhaarat ko bachaao’ or ‘Humari jaan Hindustaan’, maximum reaction would have been a yawn or a raise of an eyebrow. Or both, if somebody really liked it and were generous.
It would NOT have made people sit up and think about the current state.
Diverting from the song for a moment, the Election Commission started many campaigns this year to urge Indians to come out and vote yet the turnout was only around 50%
It’s not like we don’t care. It’s just that we don’t care enough to make an effort to even elect the best men to decide the future and fate of our country. We are comfortably numb and almost sleepy to what is happening to us.
And how do we wake up a person who is asleep? Do we sing lullaby to him? Or do we shrug him and shake him out of sleep?
As the script demanded it, with this song the characters want to shrug and shake people out of their slumber; make them realize that India is wounded. It needs us, the citizens to come forward and help it.
By now, we were clear that we wanted the song to be intense and hard-hitting; an eye-opener!! Any ‘Jaag jao… Bhaarat ko bachaao’ wouldn’t have served the purpose.
Since the film RANN is not about a battle fought on the borders of India but it is about the battle that all of us fight within ourselves, the words were meant to express “There is a battle in the minds of all people” and literally they translated into ‘Jana Gann Mana Rann hai’. This was the birth of this song.
Yes, there is a reference to the respected National Anthem of our country but this song is NOT our National Anthem nor is it demeaning or insulting it in any way. While the National Anthem speaks about India and Victory, this song talks about the ‘need’ to achieve that victory by keeping India united today. Infact it reaffirms all the goodness that the National Anthem stands for. But at the end of the day, it is just a song by itself pertaining to the script and the scenes of the film.
How can you call it National Anthem when there are 100 different words used in it? (Yes I counted, 100 words!!)
Kindly go through the lyrics once and decide for yourself if there is any insult to India… Kindly understand the intent before blindly judging the content… Kindly ask yourself if you don’t really want India to be free from all corruption, bloodshed and destruction… Kindly be honest…
And yes, you can count the 100 different words here too (They are the ones not bold)
Jana Gann Mana Rann hai …is Rann mein Zakhmi Bhaarat ka Bhaagya Vidhaata
Punjab Sindh Gujrat Maratha Ek doosre se ladd ke mar rahein hai Is desh ne humko ek kiya Aur hum desh ke tukde kar rahein Dravid Utkal Banga
Khoon bahaa ker, ek rang ka …kar diya humne tiranga Sarhadon pe jung aur …Galiyon mein fasaad danga
Vindh Himachal Yamuna Ganga Mein tezaab ubal raha hai Mein tezaab ubal raha hai
Mar gaya sab ka zameer Jaane kab zinda ho aagey Phir bhi Tava shubh naame jaage Tava shubh aashish maange
Aag mein jal kar cheekh raha hai Phir bhi koi nahi bachaata Gaahe tava jaya gaatha
Desh ka aisa haal hai lekin Aapas mein ladd rahein Neta Jana Gann Mangal daayak jaya hai Bhaarat ko bacha le Vidhaata!!!
Jaya hai – Ya yeh – Marann hai Jana – Gann – Mana – Rann hai
This song reinforces and urges citizens to respect India, its greatness and it’s National Anthem.
If anyone thinks that it is a crime to ask Indians to stand up and help India be the glorious Country that it was, then I have only one thing to say… “BHAARAT KO BACHAA LE VIDHAATA”
- Sarim Momin (Lyricist of Jana Gana Mana RANN) Why Jana Gana Mana RANN?Apparently some people are saying that I have done this for publicity. Of course, I have done it for publicity. Without exception, any material that goes out of a filmmaker’s office be it by way of interviews, or by way of audio-visual, or music pieces, or anything else is to garner publicity for his film. I have made a film, and I want as many people out there as possible to know that this film will soon come to their theatres and I also want them to know what my film is going to be all about. With RANN I want to bring to people’s attention the battle that they are fighting with the powers-that-be of our so-called civilized society. But now it is claimed that some people have got upset over the promo because of the usage of the song. If I had known that before, as the conspiracy theories are alleging, my question to them is why would I deliberately want to turn them off against my own film when they too are my audience? To start with, the ’Rann’ song is not the national anthem. It’s just an inspiration from what the national anthem stands for. The national anthem in totality has a completely different meaning compared to that of the ‘Rann’ song. However the ‘Rann’ song stands for exactly what the national anthem stands for albeit in today’s time and in consideration of what we as a people of the country are going through. There was no attempt on my part to ridicule or demean or show the national anthem in a bad or comic light for it to offend people. In a soulful voice and with heart-touching lyrics it seeks to draw attention of all concerned to the problems that the country has. If the question “Why Jana Gana Mana Rann?” is pertinent, the answer too is pertinent. All one needs to do is to very seriously listen to the ‘Rann’ lyrics carefully and attempt to dispute the truth in them. We keep screaming “Incredible India”, “Mera Bharat Mahaan” etc with a halo of well-intended but truly misplaced self-praise. While it may fool the eyes of some tourists etc, the hard cold facts concerning the reality about India is not unknown to the people of the country. Terrorism, poverty, riots, debt-ridden farmers suicides, dowry deaths, rapes, murders, drought, famine, flood have become mere symbols that are highlighted as conscious awakeners for vote banks, while people’s hearts are bent on their own self preservation. The nation is in a danger of becoming impotent by choice of not reacting and it’s this sad state of affairs that I wanted to decry in the emotions behind the song Jana Gana Mana Ran, by exercising my fundamental right for freedom of speech and expression which is guaranteed to me by the Constitution of India under Article 19. And now my question to the detractors is, what better instrument could I have had to highlight this cause, than an inspiration from the National Anthem itself that we as a nation so often proudly give lip to but always forget to honour?
– Ram Gopal Varma
“Where the mind is without fear, and the head is held high, Where knowledge is free, Where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls, Where words come out from the depth of truth, Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection, Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action, Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake” – Rabindranath Tagore 2009/5/6 RANN2009/4/30 Aaajaaaaareee……I was always fascinated with the haunting songs from yesteryear films like ‘Woh Kaun Thi’, ‘Gumnaam’, ‘Kohraa’ etc.
So inspite of AGYAAT not being really a Ghost film I just wanted to do a song on those lines. Since the basic point of the film is that you can’t see the Antagonist in the film I thought it will be an interesting idea to put forth that thought though the lyrics of this song.
The Music is by Bapi-Tutul Lyrics by Prashant Pandey Sung by Shweta Pandit
Also I am putting some shots from the film to go with the sound-track. This is neither a Trailer nor a Music Video. It is just some random shots taken from the film to go with the feel of the song.
AGYAAT - Sunn Saakte (Hindi) Sunn saakte toh.. bhaag sakte ho.. Iss darr ka na koi chehra…
Aayeega… jaan le jaayeega… Agyaat hai…
Zehreela… saaya… tadpayeega…
2009/3/16 Of Awards
For me Awards and their corresponding events are at best entertaining events and at worse they are corruptive, not necessarily with regards to who is given what award but on their very structure itself. To start with filmmaking 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 only exception to this will be songs as they can stand alone as separate of works of art in the album. So it’s highly possible that a very capable technician does fantastic work and the Director can screw it up by using it in the wrong context and if a technician does bad work it can be easily covered by the overall effect. In both the cases only the Director will know and not even the team members can know as they cannot independently have an idea of how good or how bad the Director was thinking to start with.
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. They would have seen nearly 50 odd films of his previous work over the years ranging from good, bad and ugly but the point is that his sound designing in them went unnoticed. Now that the media screams that he has got an Oscar everybody is talking about sound design.
Does any of the guys who are jumping with joy about Oscar triumphs know or care who got the sound design award at the Oscars last year or all the years before that or for that matter in our own desi awards? Then what’s all this sound about? 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 and from then on everybody sounds off on sound design without even having a faintest idea of what it is.
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.
Coming to actor’s performances if the comparison for instance is between Aamir for X role and Abhishek for Y role and SRK for Z role, my question is what if SRK plays Y role, Aamir plays Z and Abhishek X? How can one know whether they would have done better than the other one or not? So are they giving awards to actors or characters? If it’s characters then they are written by writers and how the effect of a character comes about is dependant on a variety of factors, such as the screenplay, the co-actors performance, the editing, direction etc and under no stretch of imagination can that credit be given to the actor alone. Unlike the Stage the only true judgment of cinematic acting can be done between the start and the cut of a shot. It is because in this time period alone the actor is drawing up an emotion on cue and releasing it when the director says ‘cut’. So how much he elevated the character from the director’s vision, only the director can know and then it’s also highly possible that same performance can be completely screwed up by the director on the editing table or if it is wrongly placed in the screenplay or the impact also can be lessened by a ineffective reaction of a co-actor. So a number of people’s talents and their complex interweaving results in the sum total effect of a film moment or the film itself and there is no way for an outside body irrespective of their expertise to analyze and determine the individual credits.
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. But if I use them wrongly the film does not work. But when it works and I am being praised I know in my heart which individuals specifically have lifted a particular moment in the film or the whole film itself.
So in short, 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.
2009/2/14 The “AGYAAT” Jungle
I always believed that a location in a film should be treated like a character. In the right context and rightly composed you will almost feel as if the location is alive and will have a recall value long after you have seen the film. A few examples that I can give is the Sarkar house and the Bhoot apartment. The house in which I shot Sarkar is now referred to as the Sarkar house by people in the industry. Many films have been shot at that location before and since but it comes to life only in Sarkar and that’s because of the context it’s been put into. I wanted to capture an emotional aspect of the feeling when we look at the house of a man towards whom we have awe in our hearts. So it’s really the feeling which is being captured with a combination of the composition, background score and its placement in the edit.
Similarly in Bhoot the apartment and its building became synonymous with Manjit the ghost. Repeatedly using the same angles and compositions in that apartment created an effect of a character coming in to the film again and again. Also by making the geography of the apartment very clear to the audience I created an effect of the viewer feeling that he himself is living there. The effect of the Bhoot apartment was to the extent that till today 6 years after its release I am told that nobody lives there and the owner of the apartment just uses that space to store some old furniture. Very few films give this much importance to locations and hence we rarely remember locations in films. The first time I felt this impact was in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”. The house in Psycho looks as sinister as the killer and this is not because of its architecture but because of the context in which it has been put into.
Coming to the jungle in which I shot “Agyaat”, I have seen personally quite a few jungles in India, like Ranthambore, Madumalai, Wynad and also in Malaysia and Bangkok not to mention countless other jungles on video ranging from Indonesia to Brazil.
But when I set my eyes on the Sigiriya jungle in Sri Lanka, it took my breath away with its sheer character. One might say a jungle is a jungle but then you have not seen the Sigiriya forest. It’s both enchanting and terrifying at the same time. Every tree of it looks like it’s got a story to it and hiding something beneath it just waiting to pounce on you. For the subject matter of “Agyaat” which is about a set of people trapped in a jungle and something out there killing them one by one I couldn’t even have dreamt of finding a location anywhere as incredible as Sigiriya, especially since I had no intention of showing the entity which is creating the terror. It is imperative that the jungle substitutes for the entity which is killing them. As a director I have never been more thrilled on a location shoot than in Agyaat and that is thanks to the Sigiriya jungle.
I am putting some stills from the film here and also some video footage just to give you an idea of how frighteningly sexy the Sigiriya Black Jungle looks.
2008/12/27 Bad "Company”Somewhere in 2000 I happened to be in the company of a man called Haneef at some producer’s house. Haneef was the owner of Magnum Video, was in jail in the serial blast case for 5 years and also reportedly very close to Dawood.
Out of my curiosity and my obsessive tendency to know and understand the psychological aspects of criminals, I got talking to him. In about an hour I spent in Haneef’s company he told me various things on how the underworld operates. Also those were the days where the media was full of stories on the war between Dawood and Chota Rajan and in that context he said the following to me “So many people on both sides died in their war with each other. They so desperately want to kill each other but Ramuji I am telling you this that even today if Dawood calls Rajan on the phone and if Rajan is smoking a cigarette he will drop it and say “Haan! Dawood Bhai!” That is the inbuilt respect he has. They hate each other because they love each other”. Those lines of Haneef gave me the story idea for “COMPANY”.
Also in my research for “Satya’ there were so many things I learnt about the underworld which I could not incorporate in that film especially the police procedures.
So if Haneef’s quote on Dawood and Chota Rajan gave me the story, my research gave me the atmosphere and the supporting characters and the incidents I have more or less taken from my own company meaning my production office experiences with my staff over the years. The reason for this is that whenever I heard the causes for rivalry and the internal politics in the context of the underworld I always found a very strong resemblance to things which happen in any normal Company including my own office.
In a Company, the various people who work have their own individualities and relative intelligence levels and the only thing which will be common among them is an ambition and the greed to reach the top. So even though the Company as whole is working towards a goal, the people in the company will be conflicting with each other which creates politics, frustration, jealousy etc.
This is a truth for any Company whether it is a normal or an underworld company with the difference that in a normal company if you do a mistake you will be fired and in an underworld company you will be fired upon.
Everyone could easily understand and relate to Yadav’s jealousy that Mallik is favouring Chandu because everyone would have been one of those three and would have known the other two. So this is my proof that it’s not so much about knowing the underworld as much as knowing people.
I want to share an interesting aspect of Company’s prologue where we see the eagles flying over the city. Much after the principal shoot got over, I asked my cameraman to take some shots of the city to use them in the edit and when he was doing that on a certain location the eagles just happened to be there which he shot. When I saw the rushes on the Avid those shots reminded me of the opening scene of ‘Mackenna’s Gold’ one of my all-time favourite films and I was seized by a desire to somehow incorporate those shots in the film. My editor suggested that he can use them for exterior cuts of the city in between the film at various places to which I said that it will just make them informative whereas I want to make a big deal out of it like in ‘Mackenna’s Gold’.
So I thought if I do a very sub-textual and profound and meaningful sounding voiceover then I can get away with using those shots. I wrote the lines “Eagles have lot of patience and they for wait months to get to their prey”. When he read that line my assistant said it won’t work as we are seeing the birds literally and eagles don’t do that. So to counter my assistant I changed the line to “Very few people know that eagles have lot of patience and they wait for months to get to their prey”.
I told my assistant that most of the guys sitting in the theatre anyway won’t know anything about eagles and the fact that we are making a strong statement saying that “very few people know that” will make each and every one of them feel that he doesn’t know that. Even if a few don’t buy it by the end of the film they would take it for granted that it’s not to be taken literally.
Today since the last 6 years so many people talk to me about the effect of that prologue and only I know in my heart it came from nothing but a childish desire of mine to somehow have that “‘Mackenna’s Gold” shot in the film.
To move on to how “Khallas” song happened I did a unique experimentation in it. I told the choreographer let’s not give any objective space to the camera and treat it as one of the guests in the club. What I mean is typically in a song shoot we have the frame designed for the camera and everything is placed and moved to its convenience but the moment we take that away and we create a subjective space a kind of unpredictability is created. I told the cameraman to keep zooming and panning to whatever attracts him as an individual irrespective of what the choreographer has asked the actors to do and lastly I told the editor to edit it in a way that when you stay late at a club, come back, pass out and in the morning you only have recollections of some moments half dreamy and half real. After this brief to the three I pretty much refrained myself from both the shoot and the edit. The effort of 3 superb technicians with regard to their individual briefing and my effort to see that they don’t coordinate with each other is what resulted in ‘Khallas’.
When people ask me which is my favourite among ‘SATYA’ and ‘COMPANY’ I find it very difficult to answer as the difference between them is that ‘SATYA’ is Emotional and ‘COMPANY’ is Intelligent. So I think these two states of minds would make one feel whatever of those two films.
Incidentally Haneef, the originator of ‘COMPANY’ was shot dead a few months after I met him and the last thing he told me or rather advised me when he got to know that I was making ‘COMPANY’ was not to waste my time doing dark films and instead make a romantic musical with Nadeem Sharavan’s music. Maybe he was Bad Company but he surely gave me good “Company”.
2008/11/16 The idea of “AGYAAT”
I have always been an incredible fan of the thriller genre where there is an unknown or a known element which is out to kill at random a group of people trapped in a certain situation whether it is Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ or John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. Not to forget the “Blair Witch Project” in which the genius of the concept has gone to the extent of not showing the antagonist at all. I have titled my film based on this concept as ‘AGYAAT’ meaning the unknown. Thrillers of this kind are a very popular genre abroad, not to forget the success of numerous dubbed one’s here in India as well. But as yet no film in the same genre has been seriously attempted with Indian actors with a story designed for Indian audience. This movie’s intention would be to explore that and also would be about the emotional complexities that extreme fear would unleash and how the triumph of human spirit refuses to give in even against impossible odds. Story Idea: A film unit on a shoot in a far away land and in a certain situation gets trapped deep in a forest and one by one the members start getting killed. They all are terrified not knowing whether it is a man or an animal or a creature or what? Why I selected a film unit to be the protagonists for this story is because a film unit is literally like a walking office in terms of its various hierarchical elements. A star who is obsessed with himself, a leading lady who bears with him because of his stardom, a director who thinks he will be the next Steven Spielberg, a producer who thinks that the director is screwing up his film, an assistant director who has a crush on the heroine, a script girl who has quite a few things for the assistant director, a frustrated action director who has a hidden maniacal streak in him, a highly subservient spot boy with a very perverted agenda, are just a few of the assorted characters in this story. Whatever the entity is as it hunts them down, their suppressed passions come forth and they realize that it is not only their lives they are fighting for but it is also for their loves. As they are killed one after the other the remaining desperate characters struggle to survive the entity which is not visible to them, faster than them, smarter than them and hell bent on destroying them. The film will be very near to a reality show in a certain sense as in putting a set of people in a certain situation and to see what happens to them. It will have a cast of unknown or little known actors based on the complete suitability of the way the characters are written in the script. The entity in the film is really a premise and what really is exciting for me in the story is the human drama of how in a given situation the whole film unit’s hierarchical differences get erased and all of them become as human as anybody else when faced with death. To capture how their attitudes, personalities and inter-relationships change rapidly in the face of the impending danger is what for me is the most exciting and challenging part. I am intending to start the film in December and finish the principal photography by January 1st week. There will be quite a lot of Special EFX work after that which will take as long as is required to get the intended effect. The movie will be ready for release in May/June 2009. 2008/10/30 Casting रणWhen News Channels, Political parties and Industrial czars are the principal movers and shakers in a film, there is obviously a tremendous scope for high drama. As I mentioned in my earlier post on रण, the film is going to be a very high drama affair. And this is not so much my conscious intention as the director of the film, but the very demand of the subject matter.
Having said that, even the so-called high profile people at the end of the day are, ‘people’. And no matter how powerful they are, they are not without their share of insecurities, egos, jealousies, and dilemmas. I really enjoyed the process of casting for the incredibly exciting and thrilling characters of रण. These are a few of them: Harshvardhan Malik Cast: Amitabh Bachchan The founder of the first ever private news channel in the country INDIA 24/7, the Harvard-educated Harshvardhan Malik is India’s most respected media personality. He is a hardcore upholder of journalistic ethics. No wonder his Channel is battling for survival! Jay Malik Cast: Sudeep A go-getter and highly aggressive and ambitious son of Harshvardhan Malik, Jay looks at his Dad’s news channel purely as a business enterprise that must make profits to justify its existence. He hates that his competition is doing better than him. Purab Shastri Cast: Riteish Deshmukh Armed with a degree in journalism, Purab Shastri truly believes that the media should be the check point for the people of a country, and therefore, it should report news, instead of manufacturing news. Purab’s thinking sets him apart from most youngsters of this country. While everyone is chasing their individual dreams, Purab aggressively wants to work towards a better India. Needless to say, a clash between Purab and the powers-that-be looks inevitable. It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong! Mohan Pandey
Cast: Paresh Rawal It is every politician’s dream to become the Prime Minister of his country. To that extent, the leader of the opposition Mohan Pandey is no different from his contemporaries. The only difference being - if the need arises, Pandey can and will kill to get the coveted chair. Amrish Kakkar Cast: Mohnish Behl Amrish Kakkar was the first to have the VISION and the foresight to realize that even the business of delivering NEWS can be made ENTERTAINING. Amrish therefore can be safely held singularly responsible for taking the television news industry to the dogs, or to the heights, depending on how you see it. His channel is no less than a shady brothel, the content that is NEWS is no less than a cheap hooker, and Amrish Kakkar - the most powerful pimp around. Nalini Kashyap Cast: Manisha Koirala Nalini Kashyap is the programming head of Harshvardhan Malik’s news channel, INDIA 24/7. Having been in the industry for long enough, she has developed a practical view of how things operate here. And this comes in direct conflict with what her boss Harshvardhan Malik, thinks. Juggling the cut-throat world outside with the idealistic universe of her boss, Nalini Kashyap has her job cut out. Naveen Shankalya Cast: Rajat Kapoor Naveen Shankalya, apart from being the son-in-law of Harshvardhan Malik, is also one of the topmost industrialists of the country. Despite this, he is the most insecure man on earth, and won’t rest till he becomes the number one industrialist in the country. His best buddy Mohan Pandey becoming the Prime Minister of India will surely help his cause. Nandita Sharma Cast: Gul Panag The assistant of an ad filmmaker, Nandita Sharma someday hopes to bag an independent feature film. She is in a live-in relationship with her boyfriend Purab. Nandita is smart, educated, and intelligent. She is also highly indifferent to what’s happening in the country, and first thinks about herself and her man, before anything or anybody else. On both counts, she represents the youth of India. Yasmin Hussain Cast: Raima Sen An ex-model, and fiancée of Jay Malik, Yasmin watches TV, reads gossip columns, and for most part, takes everything that is dished out to her, AT FACE VALUE. She does not understand the intricacies of power games, and hidden motivations behind actions of people. The resources at her disposal to know what is true and what is not, are limited. She is not innocent, and she is not clever either. Yasmin therefore epitomizes the ‘common man’. Anand Prakash Trivedi Cast: Rajpal Yadav A creative editor, Anand Prakash Trivedi has a knack for sensationalizing even the driest story and making it sound like the story of the decade with super catchy headlines. More than any filmmaker, he makes far better movies. Only, he calls them NEWS. 2008/10/16 रण - a NEWS storyI have titled the film I am going to make on the media as रण.
रण means battle. And battle is a fight between large organized forces. In the context of a civil society and its deep complexities, large organized forces (read news channels, political parties and industrial czars) are not just involved in a fight with each other, but more importantly and frighteningly, they are battling a war within themselves and this is especially true of news channels.
If dog bites man, it is not news. But if man bites dog, it is news. And if a cat bites a dog, it’s Breaking News. Getting news is not the easiest thing in the world, so the next best thing obviously would be to make anything and everything appear to be news.
The way the news are presented today are much more entertaining than family soaps and thrillers. What’s worse is that we enjoy this kind presentation so much that we have got addicted to them for our daily dose of fun and drama.
AND HIGH DRAMA IS WHAT रण IS GOING TO BE.
There is the government - a system which runs the country, then there are wealth creators like industrialists etc and then there are politicians in the ruling party and the opposition. All the above in a democratic society are supposed to be working for the common people and the one and only means of the common people having any idea as to what those are up to is through the media. Hence the media has been invented as a truth telling machinery serving the purpose of the common people so that they know they are in good hands or in case they are told that they are not, they can hope to exercise the power of their vote to bring about a change.
But in a free economy system where there is so much competition the media by default is lost in its purpose.
The Media is a reporting agency. It reports News. NEWS is what is new. New is what you hear for the first time. So to be able to be the first to tell you the various Newspapers and Channels have an intense competition among themselves and this they do on a need to survive, on an ego to be on the top and on a greed to get rich.
To be ahead of competition means more circulation and higher TRPs which in turn generate more and more Ad revenue which will translate into making more and more and more money.
Also the fact that in the process the people who run the media realize their power of influencing the common people inevitably makes them power hungry.
To sum up this film’s intention would be to expose the behind-the-scenes truth of how a truth telling machinery by the very virtue of its positioning has no choice but to corrupt itself to become a money-making and power-brokering enterprise.
Truth is Terrible
- Friedrich Neitzsche (Ecce Homo)
2008/10/13 My reactions to reactions1. You are a sociopath on the loose.
Ans: You can also add psychopath to that. 2. What would have Satya done if Bhau asked them to come to his house?
Ans: When I die and go up I will ask Satya and let you know. 3. People who take you words seriously should get their heads examined.
Ans: I want to kiss you. 4. You are suffering with a Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Ans: Ok doc. 5. My mother says that you are half mad.
Ans: And my mother says that your mother is full mad. 6. I find songs distracting in a movie.
Ans: If the songs feature nice legs, heaving bosoms, slim waists and voluptuous butts I many times find the story distracting. 7. Can a book change the reader?
Ans: No. But a reader can shut it. 8. Can you publish the article you have written “The ideas that killed 30 million people”?
Ans: I don’t have a copy as I wrote it 20 years ago. But I will quote a few passages from it. The start of the article:
Although the Ideas that nourished the intellectual roots of Adolf Hitler can be traced back to many a megalomaniacal thought that poured out from a few German minds of the 19th Century not other man’s thoughts have contributed so much to the barbaric part of the Nazi mind as those of the philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche.
The essence of the article:
I quoted from Nietzsche’s “The natural history of morals”. “The strong men, the masters regain the pure conscience of a beast. They return from a fearful succession of arson, rape, torture and murder with the same joy in their hearts and the same contentment in their souls as if they have indulged in a harmless students rag. When a man is a master by nature and violent by gesture, of what importance are treaties to him?”
My writing in the article under the above quote:
These words uttered by the most terrible man that has even existed on the face of the earth as Nietzsche described himself in his autobiography “ecce homo” had a profound impact on the shaping up of the mind of Hitler and host of lesser Nazis and in time they would justify such ruthless deeds as the breaching of the Versailles treaty, the violation of the Hague Convention, the killing of his own followers in the blood purge of June 1934 and the senseless massacre of millions in the IInd World War and the brutal torture of Jews in Auschwitz and other such concentration camps”. The end of the article:
All things said and done no one can blame Hitler for surprising the world with his doings because he bared each and every intention of his, years before he was given the power to do them. Any reader of his autobiography “Mein Kampf” will have no doubts about that. 9. What compels you to do something that you did not believe in?
Ans: A little bit of not being sure and lots of dumbness. 10. Why don’t you shoot ur movie and watch it yourself?
Ans: Why don’t you write your comment and read it yourself? 11. If you are so selfish can you make a movie without cameraman, assist. Director, choreographer etc?
Ans: If you are so charitable why don’t you give away your pen, internet and your brain and then try to communicate? 12. Creativity should not fill your head. Give some space for humanity in your grey cells.
Ans: Pompousness should not fill your head. Give some space for creativity in your grey cells although I suspect you have none. 13. Satya and Company are highly superior films. We believe in your genius inspite of Aag.
Ans: Hello. Hello. Hello... if there is one thing I am scared of more than my haters it’s well-wishers and patronisers like you. That’s because I can so easily fall a victim to your kind of breed as you guys create a false sense of security. I beg you and plead to you and request you to chill and see my movies and read my blog if you feel like it or don’t if you don’t feel like. I don’t need anybody to tell me how good or how bad I am. If you praise me beyond what I think of my worth is, I will think you are a fool and if you praise me below what I think my worth is also I will think you are fool. Nobody knows me beyond I, me and myself.
Oh my haters! I plead you all to come save me, a self-obsessed megalomaniacal fuck-all filmmaker from the love of my well-wishers and patronisers.
P.S: I think I have overdone this but what the hell. I was just in the mood Vaishak :) 2008/9/20 Cons, lies and one truth.(This has to be read in continuation to my previous post titled “Wrong is right”.) As I was hanging out on the sets of ‘Collector Gari Abbayi’ Surendra had an idea of making a film based upon ‘The Sound of Music’ which was later made into ‘Rao Gari Illu’. In ‘Collector Gari Abbayi’ since I came towards the end after most of the script was done and decisions of casting and selection of technicians were already made, I thought it will be a unique opportunity to be involved in a film right from the inception of the idea. By that time my status was that I became close to Venket and Surendra and Nagarjuna but nowhere were they remotely in a state of mind to offer me a film to direct, their basic contention being I don’t have practical experience.
But on the force of my personality I slowly started influencing Surendra who wanted an established Director for ‘Rao Gari Illu’ to take a new Director with lots of experience. I suggested Tarani the 2nd assistant in ‘Collector Gari Abbayi’ who had around 14 years of experience and who I knew well. My agenda was that if he is directing I can be an intrinsic part in all the decisions right from the beginning or more simply put, that I can be a backseat Director. So I manipulated Surendra to decide on Tarani which he finally did. I was ecstatic because of this development as it gave me a chance to study right from the ringside how an idea grows and shapes up into a film. Little did I know how horribly wrong this would go. Tarani initially was very grateful to me as he knew that I was the main reason for Surendra to take him as a Director, but slowly with time he grew tremendously irritable with my constant perceived interference which I thought were my creative inputs and also became very jealous of my proximity with the actors and the Producer. A.N.R, Nagarjuna’s father, was the star of the film who kept a distance from everybody including Director Tarani. All the other actors like Jayasudha, Revathy etc used to constantly want to interact with me more than Tarani which understandably upset Tarani a lot. A point came where Tarani gave an ultimatum to Surendra that he won’t shoot if I am on the set. Seeing Surendra’s dilemma I offered to stay out. But the problem was that since it was me who narrated the story to all the actors and Tarani was not shooting it the way they thought it should be and also that he was not able to tell them the reasons for the changes created a lot of discomfort on the set.
Meanwhile ‘Collector Gari Abbayi’ released and became a big hit and Nagarjuna was in form. By that time he already came into a frame of mind to take a chance with me as a Director. But A.N.R was completely against it and told Nagarjuna ‘just because Ramu can speaks in English and quote from English novels and films does not mean that he can direct’. Nagarjuna expressed his helplessness.
As this was going on, one day Tarani was shooting a key scene and A.N.R had a doubt on the structuring of the scene which Tarani could not answer. To escape Tarani told him that the scene was conceived by me and approved by Surendra and that he was just forced to shoot it. A.N.R called for me and Surendra.
He took off on me at the stupidity of the scene when I stopped him and explained to him the whole point of the scene and how it should be shot and in that discussion A.N.R realized how wrongly Tarani was shooting and worse than that he didn’t even understand the point of the scene. He asked me to be present for the shooting of the scene and by the end of it he told Nagarjuna at home that he was mighty impressed with me.
With that practically all decks were cleared as A.N.R gave a green signal at least to seriously consider to give me a break. Nagarjuna was positive anyway and Venket and Surendra were reasonably positive but still dilly dallying a little now and then. Now the question was when? Venket said they were shooting a film called ‘Vijay’ with B.Gopal and Surendra was planning another film with Kodandi Rami Reddy starring the father and son again and after that there was another project with K.Raghvendra Rao. So Venket said they can think about my film only after those films got over. My heart sank as I was in no mood to wait that long.
By that time I understand enough of how the industry operates. Surendra asked me to make a story for Kodandi Rami Reddy’s film which I did. He signed Ganesh Patro as a dialogue writer. Kodandi Rami Reddy during those days used to do 7 to 8 films a year and most of the time would not even remember the story of the film he is currently shooting. I took in this information. I narrated the story to Mr.Reddy and Mr.Patro who were fine with it. Then Surendra wanted Mr.Patro to go to Hyderabad, as at that time we were all in Chennai, to narrate to A.N.R as he was shooting in Hyderabad. Later that night I talked to Mr.Patro and offered to go to tell the story to A.N.R myself. Mr.Patro to save the trouble of going called up Surendra and told him to send me to tell the story as I anyway have written it.
So Surendra sent me to Hyderabad to tell the story to A.N.R. I went there and by a deliberate design I narrated the story in such a way that A.N.R. had lots of problems with the script. He called up Surendra and Mr.Patro and Mr.Reddy and told them the story does not work at all. They were taken by surprise and waited for me to come back to tell what the problem was.
I went back and told them a completely different version of problems for what A.N.R had, which were designed to confuse Mr.Patro and Mr.Reddy. The advantage I took is that I clearly knew that Mr.Reddy does not have a script sense and he also has a weak memory and Mr.Patro at any given point of time is busy with 10 films and he is primarily a dialogue writer. So the sum effect of all these proceedings of them not knowing what I told them and the complicated design I worked on confusing them resulted in suddenly there was no script for the film and the dates of Nagarjuna were just around the corner.
Leaving all three in the room in a state of confusion, I went to Nagarjuna who used to live in the upstairs of the office then and told him that there is no script for the Kodandi Rami Reddy film and there’s no way a script can come up in the given time and I said since my script is ready as long as he decided to take a chance on me someday or the other why not take it now. He asked me about what Surendra might say. I went to Surendra and told him that since he will loose a project with Nagarjuna and not get his dates for quite some time, I will try and convince Nagarjuna to do my film in the same dates, to which he agreed. Then I met Nagarjuna and told him Surendra is keen to do the film with me only and I called Surendra in and told him Nagarjuna is fine with it. I don’t know how clear I am being here but the basic point is that I made both Nagarjuna and Surendra feel that it the other’s decision. But both of them said they have to talk to Venket. He wasn’t home as he went for a party. I waited till midnight until Venket came and told him that both Nagarjuna and Surendra decided to do the film with me. He was non-committal. In the morning before Venket woke up I told Nagarjuna and Surendra that Venket was very happy about the decision. And after Venket woke up I took care that no two of them will meet with each other without me being present. They three also had some subtle personal issues with each other which I took advantage of by making each feel that if one opposes the other two will support me.
Then I leaked out the news to the staff at the office. So when Surendra was asked by a staff member if Mr.Reddy’s project has been shelved, I told Surendra it could have been leaked out because of Nagarjuna or Venket and told him that he should hurry up and break the news to Mr.Reddy himself before Mr.Reddy gets to know from outside which is bound to create a bad taste. So Surendra met Mr.Reddy and told him.
The news spread like a wild fire as a major production company like Annapurna Studious dropping the reigning top Director Kodandi Rami Reddy and signing on a rank newcomer Ram Gopal Varma has never ever happened before. With a formal telling by all three to A.N.R, they gave a go-ahead and “Shiva’s” pre-production work started in full swing.
I conned and lied to everybody concerned but the one and only one truth was that I genuinely believed in my heart that ‘Shiva’ would be a far superior film to whatever Mr.Reddy might make and also that it will do lot more good to all concerned and mainly to me of course.
P.S: Tarani after the success of ‘Rao Gari Illu’ made a few flops, is now back to working as an assistant director presently to Poori Jajan.
|
|
|
