reply to Anu

nu, you will be treated “badly” even if you had a degree from the best school in the world. thats just how the industry works. the ones who are thick -skinned enough to work through it are the ones who survive. as the film industry has a lot of glamour attached to it and lots of people want to join, its like a process the industry has developed to weed out the non-serious people. only the most committed and passionate people survive as a result, and they go on to carve out careers in the industry.
as for the experience, Vijay is talking about going out and living life. I have myself taken a break and decided to travel and learn about cultures and human life because thats the experience you need to be a filmmaker with a voice. a film degree is good but not all people who learn to play the guitar become good musicians. the art has to flow from within you.
directing a film requires a certain level of maturity and an understanding of the human condition which only comes from experience in real life, not by assisting a director or making a short film or going to film school(the three being the same because they only give you technical skill and experience, like learning the notes on a keyboard)
hope this helped

Fellini on Fellini

Just saw Fellini's 8 1/2.....I confess I know absolutely nothing about filmmaking.

Disheartening thought, one might say...but now I know where I stand and everything is so much clearer now. I'm actually rejoicing in the loss of my ignorance!

THE GEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH!!!

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/07/i_am_a_brainiac.html

Mr. Ebert puts so lucidly and eloquently what I have been trying to say for so long...love you Mr. Ebert. No homo.

More on it later, busy making some movies right now!

The Oneironaut

"The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving." -Waking Life

You should challenge your notions and beliefs about existence, life, reality, love, morality, rationality etc etc every once in a while. Create a "crisis in consciousness" as Krishnamurty said. Sometimes you need to sweep the firm ground you usually stand upon in everyday life and, well, free-fall! Then go salsa dancing with your confusion. Every once in a while. I've been free-falling for a few days now. Its been a free flowing stream of surrealistic films, cheese, classical music and sleep. Exploring alternate realities, like in a lucid dream. I never really was much into drugs but this is the closest I have come to tripping, yet.

It all started when I got my hands on some really cool previously-unseen DVDs through a generous friend(such a boon to have those). With nothing to do except wait for Sunday when I leave for my film-school in the Philippines, I decided that it would be a nice prelude to the whole thing if I caught some experimental, challenging movies. An overture of sorts, just to set the mood. I started with Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange', which really set the ball rolling. A cult classic, its a surreal, deeply offending, black humored work of art. Simply loved it. It is interesting how we can get so easily offended by any world-view that is different than ours. Its not a case of narrow-mindedness so much as it is a fear of the unknown. Thats exactly the idea behind free-falling. Letting go of the concepts and the definitions that restrict us and, for a while, look beyond. Exploring, venturing, letting the imagination flow freely.

Thats where art comes in. And surrealism. I was introduced to the movement quite early; the first director I worked with was an avowed surrealist. Making promos for MTV-Vh1, various ad-films, music videos and stuff, I was hooked on to his office-library that boasted of works by Floria Sigismondi, David Lachapelle and our very own Tarsem Singh. He couldn't see anything beyond these three and it showed in his considerable body of work but he was good at what he did. Really good.

Anyways, coming back to the topic, I finished watching A Clockwork Orange. On to the next one. Monty Python's Meaning Of Life, an even more offending, dark,extremely satirical pure work of art. Lovely. Then it was Adaptation by Spike Jonze and Richard Linklater's masterpiece Waking Life followed by (the most offensive of all) Un Chien Andalou, the genre-defining classic silent short film by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel. All one after the other. Exhausting? Yes! I slept for a couple of hours, woke up, and started reading about the phenomenal films I had seen, eating a rather large piece of raw cheese stolen from the fridge. The reviews and different interpretations.The philosophical themes behind them, the between-the-lines. Existentialism. Solipsism. Nihilism. Hedonism. Nietzsche. Flynt. Ebert. Everything I could find. Views and counter-views. Phew! Slept again, this time for fourteen hours straight. I woke up in a dream-like state, all the theories and counter-theories muddling my head. Had to clear my mind. Made some green tea(Mom has learned to leave me alone during such times) and listened to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on loop for an hour. I was free-falling. My definitions of what a film should be had been destroyed. My perception of reality lay shattered. My mind was still reeling from the
aftershocks. I was feeling what Neo feels in The Matrix when Morpheus says to him, "Welcome to the real world...". A whole new world of possibilities had been shown to me. A new dimension had been opened. Like when the Sphere first visits Mr Square in Flatland.

Siting there, listening to 'Beets', I felt a sudden surge of creativity inside me. I just started typing. My mind was buzzing. my fingers were ablaze. Within an hour, I wrote one of my finest poems, wrote some new movie ideas and fine-tuned some old ones. Just like that. I returned to stories I had thought of , filed and forgotten.I had really become an Oneironaut: a person who travels without physically moving. Explore new realities and dimensions. I was doing just that. I found new stories to tell where there were none. New insights. What an experience, what a prelude to film school!

Looking forward to discussion with friend and mentor Shreyas. Man, I will miss those conversations over hot Maggi.

I intend to keep falling till I fly - on Sunday to film school!


Following are the films I recommend to fellow and wanna-be Oneironauts. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list. Only the ones that I have seen:

Adaptation
Waking life
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
A Clockwork Orange
Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Paprika
The Matrix
Trainspotting
Waltz With Bashir
Apocalypse Now
Un Chien Andalou
Monty Python's Meaning Of Life

Comment on criticism against Slumdog Millionaire

Couldn't help commenting on this post on PFC.


agree with Susant and Nina here....the movie is an adaptation after all and people are taking the Oscars a bit too seriously. A masala entertainer can also be a masterpiece; I see no reason why the two can't go together. The vast majority of the people in this world are hopeless romantics and this IS a movie for hopeless romantics. The Brit accent and most other points mentioned in the post don't even matter to such people. I personally thought the direction, sound design, editing and background score were exceptional and the film actually deserved all of the Oscars it got.

So many great Hindi films are flawed but we still like them. Why such a ruckus about Danny doing the same shit too? The Oscars are not better than Filmfare and if Hritik can pass off as Akbar and the film wins awards then we have no right to judge Slumdog so harshly.

Slumdog is not a documentary on Dharavi(or Mumbai) and neither is Jodha-Akbar a History Channel special. The key concepts to understand fully here are:-
1. FICTION
2. MAGIC REALISM
3. ROMANTIC FANTASY, and
4. SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
(u can google them if u will, i personally find Wikipedia to be a great help in such matters)

Some films only seem more 'real' than others but ultimately they are all works of art that are supposed to entertain you.

And lastly, there is nothing wrong in being a hopeless romantic. I, for one, belong to the category. People should to appreciate all kinds of films. Its a shame how everyone tries to be Ebert these days....and even HE loved it!!!

Emosional Atyachar no more.....

"Happy Days are here!" they say...what with Anurag Kashyap's Dev-D getting such rave reviews and a smashing first week at the box office, one would actually start thinking that there is finally some hope for the 'indie' filmmaker, especially the young, brash types. I'm holding my horses for now, though. False alarms have been triggered before; I remember a certain Naagesh Kukoonoor(hope I got the surname right) had the same kind of hopes pinned on him after his Hyderabad Blues achieved limited success. He made some increasingly 'commercial' films after that, and his last film Bombay To Bangkok consolidated his amalgamation into the pathetic old fart we call 'mainstream Bollywood'.

The 'second wave' came with the first small-budget-multiplex-hit Bheja Fry, which made the fat, middle-aged character actor Vinay Pathak an overnight star. The 'simple man struggling in the big-bad world and getting redeemed in the end' formula became such a rage with the masses(the reason being that everybody is a simpleton at heart or some crap like that) that scores of similar films being made with the same cast playing the same characters over and over again. So much so that it became difficult to differentiate one film from another. Now how could the 'big guys' stop themselves from cashing in on this pathetic trend of glorifying mediocrity? The same formula was applied by mainstream production houses and it resulted in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi and the recently released Billu Barber, both starring the epitome of robbing-people-of-their-hard-earned-money
-by-emotional-manipulation: Shah-Rukh Khan.

While this was still going on around last year, I had made up my mind that this country had absolutely no scope for me to make the kind of films that I want to make or be a part of. Starvation and extreme poverty was the only future I could imagine, if I stayed here. I hastily applied to a top rated film school in the Philippines that is run by a Hollywood Studio. They train their own employees and the graduates get to work on Hollywood projects or something like that. I didn't care much. I just wanted to get the hell out even if it meant shooting locations for FTV Asia for the rest of my life. I didn't care. Wonder of wonders, I got selected! Then, after a month of begging my Dad to finance this desperate little adventure of mine, everything started getting fast-tracked and till last week I was sitting tight with the ticket in my hand waiting for March.

Then Dev-D happened to me. I had seen No Smoking and didn't understand the first time I saw it(well, no one did) but gradually I realized what a piece of art it was. Like Mona Lisa; the first time you see it in your life you wonder what the hype is about. It takes years of reading and thinking about it when you finally realize the genius of Da-Vinci. No Smoking was like that. For me. The 'masses' dismissed as 'too abstract' and 'way over the top' and God knows what. I wondered if Anurag would make another film again. Then I saw Dev-D, with my mom. It was sort of a test. The logic was that if mom drew a blank but I liked it then it would be another No Smoking. If mom liked it and I hated it then it would be a second Bombay To Bangkok. On the other hand, if somehow, as if by a genius masterstroke both of us liked it, then we had something here. I hoped we had something here. I am always an optimist when it comes to watching a film. That is partly why I'm still in awe of the medium, you never know what’s coming. By the time the film ended, me and my mom were sitting completely awestruck by the groundbreaking pheneomenon of a film that is Dev-D. what a film!!! Of course, there were a few middle-aged couples who walked out within the first half-hour, but you can't please everyone anyways. It is a brash film alright. I wondered how it got passed by the Censor board in the first place. I had finally seen a Hindi film that had the balls to show things the way they are, and I felt proud. Finally, a perfect balance of crowd pleasing emotional drama and brilliant and ingenious filmmaking technique. I said to myself, 'now THATS the kind of film I wannna make someday...' An honest, personal, spellbinding piece of art. The best kind there is.

So is this it? Is Anurag Kashyap the Guru Dutt of the 21st century? Only time will tell. I am not getting too cocky for now. Will have to watch his next offering Gulaal, which is releasing shortly. One thing I'll admit though. I have started having cold feet now. Maybe there is a future for me here after all. Maybe.

Its a good time for any film industry, when all kinds of films get appreciated by the audience. When small, 'arty' films can peacefully co-exist with big, 'commercial' films. When everybody does their own thing and make a decent living out of it. When everybody is a winner. As for me, I'm just a monkey typing away and waiting for Shakespeare to happen. An artist to the core, hehe.....