Internationally acclaimed cinematographer Santosh Sivan is exhausted when I meet him at his house in a quiet, secluded corner of a gated colony in Chennai. The cast has just come off an injured left arm and he is back from Mumbai after wrapping up the final schedule of the Suriya-starrer Anjaan . He is staying awake on nicotine, but despite the obvious fatigue, he springs to life when I ask about the speech he is to deliver on July 11 at the British Film Institute as part of his Masterclass at the annual London Indian Film Festival.
“I don’t think they will be interested in technical stuff, you know?” he says. “I feel they are keen to know about where I come from — my early influences, the cultural reservoir I draw from, and what I bring to the melting pot in terms of cinematography and storytelling. I believe it would make for a good collection in the BFI archives,” he smiles.
The occasion is special for Santosh also because his first internationally acclaimed film The Terrorist premiered for the British audience at the BFI. He will be addressing viewers who have seen his work. And what image of Indian cinema will he want to project? “We have all kinds of cinema: both commercial and serious. Indian cinema is peculiar, just like Indian food. It’s unique — with dance and music — which is why Western studios and filmmakers find it difficult to penetrate the Indian market, as they have in Europe,” says Santosh.
With a number of critically acclaimed movies under his belt, he has also been associated with some of the most popular films of Indian cinema — such as Mani Ratnam's Thalapathi,Roja and Dil Se . Apart from the fatter fees, does he find it as satisfying to work in big-budget, hero-driven films as he does with smaller but more personal and intimate films?
“I shoot the big films because I get the money to shoot my small films. I do it because I don’t want to get bored. Having said that, Anjaan may be a commercial film, but it has its own soul. I like how an audience responds to a song, to a larger-than-life character on screen. As a kid, I grew up watching a lot of MGR films. I like these make-believe worlds,” he says.
Some of his best works have been a result of his collaboration with Mani Ratnam, which began with the iconic Thalapathi and continued with films such as Roja, Iruvar, Dil Se and Ravanan . What was it about working with Mani Ratnam that resulted in such great imagery? “When I was honoured for my work in Japan, they were all singing ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’. It is interesting. The thing with Mani Ratnam is that he pushes his peers to give their best. For ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’, we travelled by train to so many places in India and finally decided to shoot in Ooty — the idea being to create a song that reminds us all about our first train journey, you know, through those tunnels. And in Roja , for instance, a lot of images were written in at the script level. Even in the Kashmir sequences, the audience only sees the snow when Roja sees it for the first time. These things were written into the script. It is the director’s playground, after all,” he points out.
With so much emphasis on technology and gizmos, does he feel that young cinematographers of today are not focussing enough on the basics of the craft? “What cinematographers of my generation have learnt is to lead from the front and not imitate. You learn from making mistakes. We were taught that if a painter has to have a style, a cinematographer also has to have one. My grandmother always encouraged me to sketch. Doing that, I learnt to observe, re-imagine, recreate. She used to get Raja Ravi Varma images and illustrate the mythology from them. That’s how I started imagining these worlds. The more you become technically oriented, the more you become occupied with the specifications of the camera and lose the subject of the photograph. As someone said, the best camera is what you have in your hand. Just go out and shoot.”
Talking about the importance of a cultural reservoir, he speaks of how great artists reflect their cultural sensibilities. “In England, a shot of a telephone ringing is usually a classic still shot. Whereas cinematographers in the U.S. would incorporate gimmicks to film the same shot. It is all about the approach.”
While he does not believe in formal education, he still prescribes it for the simple reason that you can share ideas about cinema. “The biggest advantage of a film school is that you meet people interested in cinema and people from various cultures. When I studied at the Pune film institute, there were students from Vietnam, some of whom had fought the Americans. It was fascinating to learn about them. But no institution can teach you anything, you can only learn what you want to. What is in the books is already there on the Net.”
Unlike many cinematographers and filmmakers of his generation, Santosh is not too sentimental about digital cinema taking over the traditionally preferred ‘film’, although he does miss it. “Most of them have shot on film all their life. There are certain advantages of shooting on film, but ideally all cinematographers should use a combination of film and digital. Thuppakki was one of the first big films in which I used a digital camera. But I used it because it was needed: a lot of sequences were shot on the roads and we had to use hidden cameras and not too many lights. So, it should be based on what the film warrants,” he says.
He describes his next film Anjaan as a challenge. Why? “This was also shot in Mumbai (like Thuppakki ), so I had to present the city in a new light.” And has he managed to do this? He smiles: “That’s for you to tell me.”
