My dream is to become a director. I want to direct a Hindi film. I have two scripts ready. One of them is a fantasy-adventure, while the other is a thriller. I’ve assisted my brother Selvaraghavan, who’s a well-known director in Tamil cinema. I’ve also made short films.
I love to go see films, even on my own. I just walk to the nearest cinema. There’s nothing better than watching a movie alone; you can just sit there and zone in.
At Harvard, direct cinema was the core of the film department, and most of the students were trying to make socially conscious works, but I was trying to combine fiction and non-fiction to show how our seemingly factual world is constituted through fantasy and stories.
I am an entertainer. Cinema is entertainment. It is nothing more than that.
I think cinema is so visually driven now, and people are so taken in by the glamour, gloss and all things good looking that we don’t appreciate the craft as much as we used to in the bygone era.
If a film becomes successful, the actor is blamed for being commercial and not having a true love for movies. When we do serious films, we will be blamed for not planning our career properly. I believe that what one should do is to make good cinema and try to make it successful.
Film used to have to be niche and find its audience in a little art house cinema, and TV had to work for everybody. And now it’s kind of flipped where there’s so many platforms that TV can be incredibly niche.
I was reared on American TV and films. There was a huge sense of occasion about going to the cinema in Moy in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and I absolutely loved those Hollywood sword-and-sandal movies like Ben-Hur and the dime-a-dozen cowboy-and-Indian films, as we then referred to them.
Cinema has the capacity to be so physiological.
I’m a huge fan of world cinema, because each country uses cinema in a very individual way.
I request the audience to not mix cinema with politics.
Don’t make your living with cinema because Hollywood will take you, will eat you, will destroy you. This is the reality. You have a good picture, have success, you take the person and they destroy you.
We shot ‘Breaking Bad’ on film; we capture ‘Better Call Saul’ digitally. In the shooting of ‘Breaking Bad,’ we would have this steady, handheld, cinema verite sort of look, so we purposely went the opposite way with ‘Better Call Saul’ – locked in the cameras and made the movements smoother and more mechanical.
My fascination is not for cinema; it’s for human nature and human beings because I find it quite difficult being one at times.
Well, I think In Love and War, which had a wonderful performance by Sandy, Sandra Bullock, who the authorities and, the supposed authorities, in cinema didn’t want to know about.
With superheroes and comics and fantasy and sci-fi being absolutely the popular currency in cinema, it’s like people have said in endless magazines, it’s the revenge of the geeks and all that. There’s some truth in that.
The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all – that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open – has disappeared.
When I was 16, I discovered this island called cinema and I thought: ‘Oh, how wonderful; I’m ready.’
I think most people, no matter their status now, have big screen TVs, because they’re the standard TVs now. And so why would you go to the cinema?
It is as difficult to define or classify Islamic cinema as it would be a Christian, Jewish or Buddhist one.
I was at the premiere of ‘Prisoners,’ and I heard two thousand people scream at the same time. I turned to my wife and said, ‘I love cinema!’ It’s the sharing of emotions together, and it’s collective. It’s one of the last communions we have.
It is said that anyone who does commercial cinema is not acting, and anyone who does an art film is acting. I don’t believe it. I feel whenever you are doing a film, you are acting. So you need to be applauded for that. I won’t do art house cinemas. I want to make commercial films. I want my films to make money.
I don’t think I’m the world’s most die-hard sci-fi fan, but I definitely grew up watching ‘Star Trek’ religiously – all of them: the original, ‘Next Generation,’ ‘Deep Space Nine,’ ‘Voyager.’ I think sci-fi has an important place in the cinema world. Fantasy is a big part of why films actually exist.
I would never put on 20 kilos and mess up my system because a role demands it. Hindi cinema doesn’t offer you roles that get you an Oscar, anyway. Tom Hanks can do it in Hollywood; not us.
Cinema is still a very young art form with extraordinary techniques and very impressive special effects but sometimes it seems the soul has been taken out of things.
