REALITY, STYLIZED: THE SANTOSH SIVAN WAY

Take a wild guess – what could be the silliest question that one can ask ace cinematographer / director Santosh Sivan.

Especially when, being one among the busiest Industry professionals, whose comeback film in Malayalam Jack and Jill is ready for release – he is not likely to give you much time.

Top of that, in all likelihood, staying at home for such an extended period might not have augured all too well with a person, who, in the first place, became a cinematographer because he likes to travel.

Yes, these conditions demand you might have one question to sneak in, maybe two.

Hold your breath!

I had this brilliant idea of asking him about his top choices in terms of films that he thinks everyone should see; films that have really impressed and had a long standing impact on him – and maybe defined his style, to some extent.

And with that, all my claims of being a seasoned journalist went for bungee jumping without a rope. The discussion took a turn that I should have foreseen. Scores of directors with hundreds of films among them; but yes, with one common thread. Each one of them is a master in visual storytelling.

Had to be, I was talking to one of the most prolific visual storytellers of our time.

TAKE FIVE: SANTOSH SIVAN’S TOP PICK MOVIES

I like different films for different reasons, actually.

Devi (by Satyajit Ray) was one such film. When I was very young I loved the film, with its black and white feel, and the kind of things it brought to screen – it was very interesting. Even though at that age I was not too sure if I liked the story very much, but I liked the way it was conceived and executed.

It was like a painting; I used to sketch, so I thought it was very interesting.

Other films that have influenced me most … well; one is ‘Bicycle Thieves’, for sure. It has really made me reach out for that kind of storytelling. For many reasons in fact – for its simplicity, the emotions it had, for the music and all these things. It is something that I think people should definitely see.

A couple of other remarkable films are, definitely, ‘Pather Panchali’ and ‘Charulata’. Basically Satyajit Ray films. There is something about his films which stays with you and it is timeless. Even in terms of cinematography, it has a ‘timeless’ quality about it – it is just about nature and stylizing it.

You know, sometimes, when you try to do things ‘fashionable’, at that particular time you might feel okay about it, but later on it becomes out of fashion. So it is always interesting to stick to a real kind of a feel and at the same time stylize it and see it differently. These films are really good examples of that.

Then of course, there are a lot of films that I really like to watch; one of my favourite is also ‘Apocalypse Now’ – because I think that film has something which takes it beyond storytelling. Not just storytelling, it has so much in it that evokes different kind of reactions – which I feel is a very interesting way to look at movies.

Among the recent ones, due to all these technological advances – ‘Avataar’ is a very good example. On one hand it still talks about good and evil, and conserving nature – while at the same time it is a very dramatic and entertaining film. The film took it beyond what people could imagine – in the sense, with the help of fantastic vfx and all that. It really touches you in a special way.

Definitely these are films that I would like to watch, and watch again, you know.

There are a lot more.

For some strange reason I am a great admirer of ‘Amadeus’; I think everyone should see that film, because it has amazing emotions; it’s all a blend of technique, and art, and music and everything. If you look at it, it has a beautiful blend of everything.

At this stage the discussion went overboard with him rattling out names in quick succession, in a manner that resembles a heady combination of feeling helpless and breathless at the same time.

Let me list down a few; Tarkovsky; Bergman; Bertolucci; Kurosawa; Kubrick; Hitchcock; Coppola … and films like Citizen Kane and Taxi Driver etc etc etc.

See what I meant; wrong question!!!

But yes, the common element in all his top five films is their breathtaking visual quality; evidently, that’s what appeals to him the most.

This might have something to do with the fact that he was born in a family where cameras were commonplace. Senior Sivan, his father, remains one of the pioneers of photo-journalism in Kerala, who later turned into a niche film-maker. In many of his interviews, Santosh Sivan has recounted how, during his school days, his grandmom, a painter, introduced him to the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma, by weaving mythological stories around them. That was, by his own admission – his first visual education.

During school itself, he also discovered his affinity with nature. It’s a fascinating story how he did that – and how that shaped him into being what he is today.

I got these inputs from a long interview he gave recently to Film Companion South, with due permission from eminent Film Critic Bharadraj Rangan.

“YOU GO ONE WAY, BUT DISCOVER OTHER THINGS!”

I used to play hockey. It was my job to stand on the terrace and look for the clouds to come and see if it will rain – so that I can call up my friends and say, ‘ It won’t rain, come.’ So I became the expert.

But standing and watching the clouds gather, and then you are seeing the green against the dark clouds, knowing that when the shower happened and then the sun comes out – very fleeting moments, but it was very beautiful. So you started learning like that. But on the same time, you also went to play hockey.

Sometimes I think you go one way and discover other things. But whatever you do, you should enjoy yourself, that’s the whole idea.

Santosh Sivan believes in first-hand experiences; like if he reads about some place – he also likes the idea of going and visiting that place. He wants the experiences for himself – because that gives him his own perspective of what it is all about.

That, and a keen survival instinct – comes together to shape his aesthetic sensibilities. I do feel, from whatever I have read about him, that he never really wanted to become an isolated art-house photographer – but wanted to weave in his sense of beauty and awe into commercial images. In a nutshell, he wanted to have fun, live his life in his own terms, and make some money out of it as well; makes sense.

Even while in FTII, Pune, he used to take cameras to the next door Kamla Nehru Park – and take photographs of children playing. He found out a way of selling those photos to their parents and earning some cash – to fuel his travel ambitions.

Perhaps one of his the best early expression of this fascinating combination of art and commerce remains Mani Ratnam’s cult classic Thalapathi. This is where he molded his aesthetic sensibilities with the requirements of the script – and the results were breathtaking, entirely standing out in the crowd.

“I ALWAYS PLAY IT ON THE EDGE”

Mani Ratnam wanted to do a tribute to ‘Karna’, a character from Mahabharata.

Now Karna’s main thing is Surya or the sun, so you tend to lean that way – to give it that feel. We did a lot of tests, you know, where we tried out the early morning feel of sun on the face and all that – and I showed them to Mani saying that this could be like this and all that stuff. Then it became very easy to just follow it.

It’s always the script that motivates you to do something special to it.

I like risks actually. I always play it on the edge. Either you win or you lose, but don’t play safe in-between – so either you go all the way out or you go all the way this side. I think most people are really like that, people who do something to create, rather than imitate. When you start imitating you want to be safe; but when you are creating something I think you have to get that urge.

If I have to shoot something and do something different, then I have to put myself and my efforts into it, in such a way so that it is not like anyone else will do it. It should be how you will do it. So when you think of all this and go and do something, definitely something will stand out or come out.

*Every film is different in approach, yet immediately recognizable as the work of Santosh Sivan…now how tough, or easy…is that?*

But does he have a ‘style’? And does he try to break it consciously, sometimes?

Getting back to all of Santosh Sivan’s Mani Ratnam films (or his own films, for that matter) – every film has a different cinematographic expression – but somewhere it stands out as his work too. That must be a tough thing to achieve.

In fact I recently read a lovely piece on Scroll about his long time association with Mani Ratnam, where he described in detail how every film they have done together threw up a different challenge. If interested, you can find the link HERE.

Yet, he somehow manages to leave his signature in everything he does.

“STAYING WITHIN YOUR ‘STYLE’ YOU CAN DO THINGS”

Style happens when you are genuine to it.

Otherwise you would be consciously breaking it. But somewhere – if you see a Rembrandt painting, and it doesn’t look like a Rembrandt painting, I wouldn’t want that painting – you know!! Or if you see a Satyajit Ray movie – I expect some signature of his to be there.

So everyone says that I try to deviate from my style – but within that you can do things.

Say I like the monochrome feel – I like black and white. So whenever there is an opportunity I will explore it – Like in Thalapathi. It gets you excited in life, so you create opportunities like that.

I think style is something that happens when you unconsciously do something that you are used to. So I am not against conceiving a style. I don’t mind. I am also not against repeating something, but I would like to do some variations to it – and see if it fits into my idea of things.

And whenever I feel I am getting very stereotyped then I go make my own films. Like you are doing a film with so many lights and everything – so I go make a small film without lights – just like that. I make sure that things do not get monotonous for me. So I will go and do films like Navarasa. I will go and do something that interests me – I will shoot in real rain like I did in terrorist, not artificial rain – I will do something different, which excites me.

So I try to balance it out.

One of the best examples of visual storytelling that I have ever seen…and I am not alone in this.

Yet another obvious query is about his core domain – the visual language.

Santosh Sivan’s storytelling comes across as if he is writing it with his camera. It’s evident in the way he picks his subjects, lights up his characters and space, as well as how he develops the flow or the progression of the storytelling in films he directs.

Much could be said with just visual suggestions that cannot be described in a thousand words – and his own films stand testimony to that, all the way.

But is that a conscious choice – or just an ingrained habit?

‘WORK ON YOUR OWN STRENGTHS, RATHER THAN IMITATE’

See Sanjay Leela Banshali is a friend. He is into music – so he sees films musically. Someone who is a writer looks at it from a writing perspective – the kind of dialogues and all; people do it differently – since everybody is fascinated with something.

So I thought, what is my strength; why did I want to do cinematography? It’s the visual language that has taken me from Kerala to Chennai to Bombay to Hollywood – everywhere. And visual language means it is universal.

So I thought – let me try to tell stories like that, as minimal as possible; and have words when it really matters. So you do it your way, rather than trying to follow or imitate something.

I somehow have this habit of pushing in an ‘editing’ question in all my talks with everyone. Makes me often think I am in the wrong vocation – instead of cutting words I should have been cutting films by now. Or maybe, this passion for the ‘cut’ gives a cutting edge (snigger!!) to the scripts I write – because it’s always written to visuals, and with an eye for the editing techniques that would go with it.

Anyways, this is not about me. It’s about how I did end up asking Santosh Sivan about his perspective – on whether the cinematographer should have a fair idea about what the editor wants from him.

“FILMS ARE REALLY MADE ON THE EDITING TABLE”

I think the role of the cinematographer’s role is very connected.

He has to have an idea of what the director would like to visualize; maybe get inputs out of him, whether the scene is something from his real life or what is it that inspired him to do that. He has to interact, of course, with the costume designer, with the Art Director, with the Production Designer to make sure that the colour palettes and the things are same.

Likewise, I think he also has to understand what the editor would like. I always interact with the editor of the film. Most of the time it is Sreekar Prasad who edits the films; so even if you are not directing a film, you always have an interaction to get a feedback. I think the editor looks at everything objectively.

Then of course it is a director’s medium, definitely. It is up to him to decide on the flow of a particular film – whether to accelerate it or not and all that.

The editor’s job is a very fascinating job. I feel that films are really made on the editing table. So it becomes very important that there is an interesting communication between the editor and the cinematographer – especially while filming is going on.

*Size does matter, but not always…it’s more about how you use the tool.*

Things are changing; now everybody has a phone-camera, and a way to feel special in social media. For someone who has spent more than three decades in the industry dabbling with probably the best of equipments – how does he feel about this change?

Let me frame that question again – is it really necessary to have high-end equipment to shoot the most effective of images? And also, in our ongoing world of rampant photo-shopping and high-intensity VFX – what is happening to the purity of the image?

What would be his advice to upcoming cinematographers – who often have to hear that the art of cinematography is dying – or already dead?

For myself, I have often faced this dilemma. Young cameramen, with whom I usually work in my docu-projects, majorly go for what they call ‘neutral’ mode while shooting – gives a kind of visuals that looks like skins of zombies hung out to dry in top-sun. And it’s not that they are using low-end cameras – what we use is the best in the business.

When they show those images to me during shoots, I am often aghast, but they assure me – ‘It’s fine sir, this helps us to do the color correction later during editing. As a result, we will get uniform colors in the film!’

That might be on-demand, but is that ‘real’? Can they later match the colours that they saw on location – do they even remember it while at the post-production? And then, do we really need uniform colours in a film? I really don’t know.

“TOO MUCH VFX KILLS THE IMAGE”

It’s like someone who was telling me – if you want to eat good fish-curry, go and buy the fish from the fisherman’s house next to the sea, because the fish will be fresh. Otherwise you will put all kinds of sauce in it and kill the taste of the fish.

So that is what too much of VFX and all that does to the image – it kills it. So the least you do, and capture everything fresh – that’s it; and use your sensibilities to the things that you know best.

I think when you point your finger at the moon, you look at the moon – don’t look at the finger. There’s no point in saying whether you shot this with a film camera or a digital camera – it can be anything, but what you shot is the moon.

Tomorrow, you never know, you might be shooting with a pen. But the fact is, what you are shooting you should know – why and how you are shooting it. That’s it.

That’s old school; my school, if I may dare to say so.

Before I end this post, my heartfelt thanks again, to eminent Film critic Bharadraj Rangan – for allowing me to use excerpts from the Film Companion South interview. Also, many thanks Santosh Sir, for pointing me to his direction. That interview was so extensive that it was really no use going through all my questions, which were similar, all over again.

For those of you that might be interested to go through that 50 minutes interview, here’s the link, pasted below. I would earnestly request you to find some time to do that – since it’s loaded with priceless gems.

And yes, thanks Sanjeev Sivan, my friend and director, for putting me across to your brother. Now there’s a lot WE need to do together – let’s brace up.

Finally, like many of you, I am waiting too for the release of Santosh Sivan’s latest film – Jack and Jill. This is his eagerly anticipated return to Malayalam cinema – and I would love to see how he has integrated his signature style (while keeping it different) in the making of this film; worth waiting – for sure.

I picked this image from Santosh Sir’s instagram post – I sure hope he doesn’t mind.