Exclusive: Rajeev Ravi interview: ‘There is a political undertone in every film I make’

Yet, there’s very little known about him and very little that he himself has chosen to share with the world. So, my tall task involved not only ‘demystifying’ him (and his craft), as it were, but also ensuring that he spoke with his trademark candour about all things cinema, politics and so much more. Lucky as I was, I got him to talk about myriad things, from his synergy with Anurag Kashyap to some of the bars he fondly remembers from the Bengaluru of the 1990s, from the film he reckons is the best adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Meek One to hypothetically attempting to make a Woody Allen-like film one day. And he chipped in with intriguing insights from time to time as the conversation took a shape of its own over the phone. Well, one thing I gathered more than anything else is that Rajeev Ravi doesn’t force a design on anything and this interview comes as a true testament to that. Excerpts:

What have you been watching lately?

I am usually very picky about stuff I like to watch because there’s so many films and shows out there that you end up feeling an overload of imagery. I have my favourite filmmakers, like Richard Linklater or Woody Allen. I am watching Allen’s miniseries Crisis in Six Scenes (2016) right now and trying to seek out their work as much as possible. Or it could be something like Furiosa or a Bond film on IMAX, which you enjoy at times because of the spectacles that they are. But yeah, I am quite selective about what I watch.

Woody Allen seems a bit far from your tone and energy, doesn’t he?

Yeah, but he is a (proper) filmmaker. It is very difficult to convert such dialogue-heavy scripts into films that have a beautiful visual language, but he does it so well.

Would you ever make a film of that kind?

Laughs… The difficult part is to tell the story through all the talking and his films largely exist in those portions. It is a challenge (to make his kind of film) for sure but something I wouldn’t mind taking up one day.

Now, coming to your own sensibility, as both a filmmaker and cinematographer, you like to keep things simple and easy whereas films today have increasingly become technical and constricted. Does the radical use of technology annoy you at any point?

You do feel annoyed because all the paraphernalia might have seen an advancement but we still make the same mistakes that we used to make 20-25 years ago. All the language on film sets and the terminology to address the machines might have changed but people are just the same as before. The mistakes while making a film are as silly and stupid as before.

I personally love being a part of Sri Lankan cinema so, I spend a lot of time there. Sri Lanka is supposed to be this invisible country with invisible people that nobody really bothers about but the people there have been exposed to Hollywood and world cinema before us. David Lean has shot a lot there, even Steven Spielberg made an entire film (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)). I also like the culture of filmmaking there. I have worked with Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage and found that they still like to have small units on sets with limited resources, but everyone comes together to do something interesting. Much like how old Malayalam cinema used to function. I prefer to work in such an environment.

You are also very selective as a cinematographer, aren’t you?

I used to be very selective earlier, yes. While I was at FTII, none of us wanted to work in the industry but be in the parallel space making some kind of arthouse films or documentaries. We never looked at the mainstream as cinema. And that was the general mood among academic places those days — from government colleges to IITs — when everyone wanted to break away from the status quo. But that disappeared after the market opened up in the early 1990s. Today, you will see 2nd year students making showreels and looking for work in Mumbai.

What kind of films did you grow up watching?

FTII has incredible archives so we were fed a lot of world cinema from Europe, Russia and other regions. We would watch all of them back to back every year. I also grew up watching all the amazing Malayalam films and then in the 1980s, Doordarshan came up with this late-night special on all the masters of cinema. And my friends and I had a film club called Cochin Film Society. I was lucky to watch a lot of stuff there. Iranian films started being available when I was in college but more importantly, we had a set of seniors who had great knowledge of cinema, literature and everything else.

Fair to say that your college (Maharaja’s in Ernakulam) is an extremely important entity in your life?

Yes, as I said, we were lucky to have seniors who had such a wealth of information. They knew about Latin literature like Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Rulfo’s works to Turkish auteur Yilmaz Güney’s films to all those gems that people haven’t read or watched even today. Our senior guys would tell us about everything they knew. Even if we hadn’t watched those films, the narrations alone were enough to be transported to those worlds. They were also very socially and politically aware in that they were inspired by various events like the Naxal movement of the 1970s, the political activity happening in their vicinity and so on. I was myself quite active in the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) or the Left Students wing during college. Whatever I am able to do today in the world of cinema, controlling 200-300 at once and all that, the training has come from Maharaja’s college (laughs).

In a way, doesn’t your second directorial Njan Steve Lopez (2014) refer to this aspect of how seniors must guide their juniors?

Absolutely. And I feel many of my batchmates and juniors have sold out. Conversely, what’s interesting is that we might call 80-90% of my seniors “losers” today, but they were all so instrumental in my life. Nobody had access to a Márquez or (Mario Vargas) Llosa book in those days but I was somehow able to read all that stuff and watch extremely rare cinema.

Were you considering becoming a filmmaker or a cinematographer at this point?

I did want to be a filmmaker but my brother had this idea that directors didn’t get a lot of work so he made me take up cinematography. I somehow landed up in that field but I have had so much fun doing what I do. I have been lucky to see people and life through the viewfinder and enjoy the world of cinema through that. I won’t obviously say I am a master of the craft but I have had a great time through the process of sculpting in time, as Andrei Tarkovsky says.

That concept of really playing with time or sculpting time, as it were, is apparent in your cinema, too. If we take Annayum Rasoolam and Njan Steve Lopez alone, the essence lies in how small, innocuous events add to the atmosphere. Time feels like it is still but it is actually slowly taking the story forward: like Fahadh Faasil’s character Rasool trying to lock eyes with Anna on the boat or the constant pursuits of Farhaan Faasil’s Steve Lopez on the motorbike to make sense of the reality around him. How do you make that happen?

Before making the film, I have a series of events or incidents placed in different orders. And I have realised that the eventual film always comes out in the shape of the very first order I choose. These events aren’t necessarily full-fledged scenes but a progression of events in the story, which then forms the script for me. You could then include characters, their names, small details, and dialogues and turn it into a screenplay. The focus, though, is to capture the emotion of a particular event and really extract from what’s in front of you during the actual shoot. It’s an organic process, to be honest, which I cannot plan in advance. You have to somehow cajole and get it out of the place, the characters and the general mise-en-scène. Although you can plan all these aspects ahead, you definitely can’t create something until you are there in person, breathing the air of the place.

That is to say that the plot doesn’t matter as much as being in the moment does?

The narrative always has to be working at all times and even as a cinematographer, I am in charge of ensuring that it is moving from one point to another. You have to make sure that not even one frame is wasted. But I have enjoyed a lot of spontaneity while working with someone like Anurag Kashyap. He does plan and write everything very well before going to shoot but he also likes being spontaneous. Having worked with him so much, I have grown to realise that the energy you feel and witness without planning for something is the best part of cinema. Sometimes you plan for six months and nothing comes out of it and there are other occasions when all you do is place the character and close-up on them, and you get it.

Each filmmaker you work with (as a cinematographer) has a unique sense of style. How do you crack what a particular director or a particular film, rather, requires?

It’s all trial and error, and you have conversations with them to figure out what the need is. You could connect on different factors. Like Udta Punjab, Abhishek Chaubey’s writing (along with co-writer Sudip Sharma) was really good and that made me want to get on board. And in someone like Prasanna Vithanage’s case, I respect and relate to him a lot because he is a big fan of (Yasujirō) Ozu, Robert Bresson and is the best minimalist I have seen. The first film of his that I watched is With You, Without You (2012 film, based on the short story The Meek One/The Gentle Creature), which I feel is the best adaptation of a Fyodor Dostoevsky story after Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959, inspired by Crime and Punishment). Mani Kaul adapted the same story (The Meek One) as Nazar (1991), with Shekhar Kapur and Shambhavi Kaul, but that didn’t work for me.

Does he (Prasanna Vithanage) give you visual references before the shoot? You have shot two of his films — Gaadi (2019), a period road film, and Paradise (2023), an urban parable.

He might refer to a few paintings, show a few photographs or maybe even ask me to watch certain films which have no connection to what we are making. But the best part is he never recommends any direct cinematic references that would resemble the look or feel of our film. To be honest, sharing pictorial references has become a pain at this point. And with AI being so big now, you are bombarded with images.

Speaking of visuals, didn’t Danny Boyle suggest some kind of an innovative technique for Dev.D (2009)? At least, that’s what the legend says…

That story is a bit stretched actually. Anurag and I met him for lunch when we were shooting in London, and he recommended we use a specific camera which would give 12-16 frames in a burst. That’s the only interaction we had back then.

Do you go back and watch any of your films? Especially Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2, which were re-released in theatres recently…

I might have watched a few clips and scenes but haven’t watched the films in their entirety again. I don’t really re-watch any of my films.

That two-part film is probably the biggest cult hit for you and Anurag, isn’t it? What has stayed back with you from the making?

Sardar Khan, because of Manoj Bajpayee, and his father’s character Shahid Khan (played by Jaideep Ahlawat). I would say Part 1 is my favourite of the two but what has really stayed back with me is the experience of working with Anurag. We have some kind of synergy when it comes to filmmaking so the rapport is beautiful.

Do you recall how he pitched the idea of Gangs… to you?

He just gave me the script and we began shooting the film (laughs). That’s how it typically worked between us. There were hardly any discussions and I don’t think any of us knew what we were getting into until we were really there, making the film (it was a single film initially and later made in two parts). We had done a proper recce and I chose to shoot one film on Cinemascope and the other on Super 35, so the prep essentially involved that sort of stuff and nothing more. We must have spent some four months at the location and figured out things on the go. Beautiful experience nevertheless.

Was there any fear or hesitation in either of you, considering the very realistic milieu of the film?

Not really. Like I said, we have a great rapport, so we explored along the way. Working with someone like Anurag, who gives you so much freedom to express and do your thing, I suppose I have grown to trust my instincts a lot. And both of us are open to suggestions so whenever there was some hesitation, we would discuss and sort it out. There were very few instances when we had to do that.

Also, we were all working together as one tight bunch because we weren’t dealing with superstars or anything. Everyone — the actors, the ADs and the crew — got along very well and even the locals gave us absolutely no trouble. We were shooting in the interiors of Uttar Pradesh and I recall one incident when we had to shoot near Saktesgarh Station. Once we got there, the production guys informed us that this was a Naxal area and that there was no administration as such, and they left. Even the police station was closed with the front gate locked up properly. But we went ahead and shot the entire night, and there was no trouble whatsoever.

Did the time spent there inspire you to make Kuttavum Shikshayum (2022) against a similar setting?

I shot that film in Rajasthan but that was mainly because I didn’t want to point a finger towards a particular region or community. The robbery you see in the film could have been committed by any group from any place in India. I was inspired by Márquez’s The Story of Shipwrecked Sailor, about a sailor who survived a major shipwreck and returned home in 1955. Marquez’s writings for newspapers, which were later published as a book, begin as a documentation of the event. I was attempting something similar: the film is a reportage of a crime until it crosses that line and evolves.

The visual treatment, too, was an experiment?

Yeah. That idea of switching from the hilly, very green Idukki area to a place with flat plains under the scorching sun was always there. I wanted to play with two different terrains. But again, it isn’t the script that really guides you but an instinct to use the physical space.

How do you direct your actors when your approach isn’t conventional? Any sense of confusion at times?

No, confusion doesn’t really crop up because the focus is on the energy or the vibe, and I am very clear about what I want. What I don’t do is push them in a particular direction and instead let them be and use the space as their own playground, try to inspire them in different ways. You have to keep the inputs to a minimum while shooting.

Thuramukham, your most recent directorial, is a bit like Gangs of Wasseypur in that it is a period film but without the grandiose scale. How did you manage that?

We had a limited budget but since we were recreating the 1940s and ’50s, there was a lot of planning. My art director Gokul Das (A.R.M, Malaikottai Vaaliban and Jallikattu) designed set pieces but we also found spots in and around Kannur that could look like Mattancherry of that era. Plus, my VFX supervisor, Rohan Rego, helped me recreate the period — interestingly, no one really talks about the VFX of Thuramukham. I do try to avoid it (VFX) as much as possible. But if it is required, like in our case, it can produce beautiful results.

What inspired you to chart the life and times of the ‘chappa’ system workers? Was it the 1979 film (of the same name)?

That film was never the inspiration but the play that my screenwriter Gopal Chidambaram’s father wrote (in 1968). We staged the play twice in Mattancherry and the response that the people gave through their collective memory became the driving point. The funny part is I didn’t know much about the place and history, even though Kochi is only 8-10 kilometres away from where I grew up. It was John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan (1986) that really introduced me to the place — you see the characters walking through Mattancherry and talking about a part of its history.

Would it be right to say Thuramukham is your most political film till date?

If you mean political in a direct way, then yes because there is a direct confrontation between the Kochi port labourers and the bosses of the system. But I feel there’s some kind of a political undertone in every film I make. Kammattipadam has a large political statement of how urbanisation and displacement work against the marginalised. Njan Steve Lopez is about how a generation comes to be when your elders and seniors let you down.

Annayum Rasoolam (a Romeo and Juliet saga between a Latin Christian woman and a Muslim man set in Vypin) refers to the Love Jihad conspiracy we talk so much about today. I grew up listening to stories or conspiracies about faith conversion and all that, so the film came from those tall tales. You heard things like “Mattancherry is called the Pakistan of Kochi” and people there, including some of my close friends, found it difficult to get a passport, a credit card etc. The film came out in 2012 and things were better compared to what they are today. But I see the story as a starting point.

Why did it take so long for you to direct your first film? I am guessing you wanted to make films in the 2010s…

I did but it was a little difficult those days to get dates from an actor. You had to carry a script and I am not a scriptwriter. Before No Smoking (2007), I pitched a film to Prithviraj (Sukumaran) but somehow things didn’t work out even when we wanted them to. Seven years later, Fahadh (Faasil) did the same film which became Annayum Rasoolam. It was he, in fact, who pushed me into making the film.