Veteran Tamil filmmaker Mani Ratnam just lately enthralled audiences at a Masterclass on “Reworking Literary Masterpieces into Participating Movies” through the fifty fifth Worldwide Movie Pageant of India (IFFI) in Goa on Friday. In a thought-provoking dialog with fellow acclaimed movie director Gautham V Menon, Ratnam delved into the intricacies of adapting literature into cinema, providing invaluable insights for filmmakers and cinema lovers alike.
Regardless of being a veteran filmmaker with a storied profession, Ratnam humbly professed, “I’m nonetheless an individual sitting within the viewers,” as he mentioned his enduring curiosity and fervour for storytelling. Ratnam additional acknowledged, “In some ways, I nonetheless really feel like a newbie,” as he emphasised on the significance of studying and rising as a filmmaker.
Ratnam emphasised the profound connection between cinema and literature, asserting that “the nearer the graph between cinema and literature, the higher Indian cinema will probably be.” He careworn that filmmakers should refine the fragile artwork of remodeling written phrases into fascinating visible narratives. This synergy, he believed, would elevate the standard of Indian cinema.
The dialog subsequently shifted to Ratnam’s current blockbuster, Ponniyin Selvan 1 and a couple of, based mostly on the eponymous novel by Kalki Krishnamurthy. When requested about potential apprehensions in adapting one in every of Tamil literature’s most beloved choices for the display, Ratnam confessed that he trusted Kalki’s imaginative and prescient implicitly. “This can be a traditional, every thing calling to be made into a movie – the characters, scale, intrigue, interval, horses, journey, and so forth. I used to be not afraid. I used to be afraid of how I may do it,” he defined.
Ratnam acknowledged the immense stress of adapting a novel that has been learn by thousands and thousands, every with their very own distinctive imaginative and prescient of the characters and story. Nevertheless, he drew inspiration from his personal experiences as a passionate reader of the novel. “The one guiding issue was that I used to be additionally one of many passionate readers, and I’ll go along with what I felt might be placed on the display,” he remarked.
Ratnam additionally praised Kalki’s writing model, which he believed lent itself completely to a long-format collection. He famous that the writer’s visible storytelling capacity made the variation course of smoother.
The dialog then veered in the direction of Ratnam’s literary influences, and he cited the instance of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He noticed how the novel improved with every adaptation, from stage to display. “The brilliance of adaptation is discovering a totally completely different language for it. If the film had caught to the first-person narration, it wouldn’t have been the identical. They utterly reinvented it,” he stated.
Ratnam expressed his admiration for the artwork of adaptation, acknowledging the challenges of changing a sprawling novel right into a cohesive movie. He confessed that he had struggled with this course of himself, emphasising the necessity for filmmakers to hone this ability.
Within the Ponniyin Selvan movies, Ratnam retained the cliffhanger that Kalki had left audiences with, addressing the thriller behind Adithya Karikalan’s dying. When Menon requested him as to why he didn’t simply present that Nandini, performed by Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, as his killer, the filmmaker defined that he noticed no level in reinventing historical past, because the thriller surrounding the Chola king’s demise stays unsolved to this present day. “Kalki coated it up utterly and let the readers think about. In movies, you must present one thing; there’s a two-dimensional picture pretending to be three-dimensional,” he stated.
