Ram Gopal Varma Blog #162. My Reactions to Reactions

1. Love you Ramu.
Ans: Love you too Shalini.

2. I am sure that there are many people in the world who are like the characters in Fountainhead though they have not heard of Ayn Rand.
Ans: Well Sandhya, that’s obviously the only reason how Ayn Rand could have written that book in the first place.

3. How can you say that films don’t influence people?
Ans: Anything which makes a strong enough point to shake up your existing beliefs can influence you whether it be a book or a film or a person or an event. But it is wrong to generalize and categorize any of them.

4. When I started reading Fountainhead, I thought you were Roark, in the middle I thought you were Keating and after finishing I think you are Wynand. 
Ans: Soon you will realize I am just Ramu.

5. What do you prefer between power and self satisfaction?
Ans: Without power there can never be a true self satisfaction and power necessarily is not of a physical kind alone.

6. Your article on film institutes made me think of a line from Fountainhead of Roark telling Keating “They will make you feel guilty of the knowledge you already have”. 
Ans: You are bang on. That’s pretty much true of most institutes which teach non-exact science.

7. RGV, I waste my time here because I don’t have anything much to do.
Ans: Ok dokey Neo.

8. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul” – if you were to depict the emotion of this line in the way you shoot, how would you construct the shot?
Ans: In a much lesser way than how Adrian Lynn did it. Adrian is a genius. The way he captured Dominique Swain in “Lolita” through the eyes of Jeremy Irons is of a very high standard and art in its purest form. No one can capture the grace and the innocence and the beauty of a woman or the intense sexual relationship between a man and woman better than Adrian. Just check his films for the proof of that (Flashdance, 9½ weeks, Jacob’s Ladder, Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, Lolita, Unfaithful etc).

9. Were you fascinated by James Bond movies?
Ans: A lot…… especially by his girls.

10. I noticed that you like being pampered.
Ans: Yes, but not more than you.

11. Whenever you copied others you succeeded and when you copied yourself, you failed.
Ans: That’s an interesting and true observation which brings us back to my theory that one of major causes for any director’s failures is when he gets too familiar with the subject matter.

12. How was the shot taken in the scene in “Darna Zaroori Hai” when the little girl sees a portrait of a serious looking lady, drops the glass, picks it up and when she sees the lady in the portrait again she is smiling?
Ans: Very simple. As the camera moved away from the portrait the art department quickly changed the portrait.

13. Which is a bigger threat between knowledge and ignorance?
Ans: Knowledge is a threat to the body and ignorance is a threat to the mind.

14. Watching “Aag” a second time, I felt it is as normal as any other movie. I think most of us in life “believe in that moment” rather than “living that moment”.
Ans: I loved your reasoning of the marriage system and reviews.

15. Did you write a qualification exam for your engineering seat?
Ans: Yes and I think I got a rank somewhere in the last 20.

16. How and why did you shoot the scene of Bhiku and Satya talking about Guru Narayan’s killing completely from their back in silhouettes?
Ans: Two reasons. One is I was tired of seeing Chakri’s and Manoj’s faces since morning of that days shoot and two is that the light was going and I wanted to finish the scene before the shift time got over.

18. Why was that shot of Urmila sitting on the terrace in “Kaun” singing a lullaby so terrifying?
Ans: A mixture of innocence and danger always creates more terror mainly because of the unexpectedness. That’s the reason most horror films feature women and children as ghosts.

19. Vivek desperate to kill the Inspector in “Company” and Ajay thinking about is very effective. Your comments?
Ans: In any normal company one employee is in a rush to do something and his boss will want to think it over to make the final decision. The subconscious connectivity of your mind to this kind of real happening to the way Vivek and Ajay are discussing a killing in the film is what makes that scene very effective. It is similar to what Francis Coppola explained about Godfather when he said, “You can’t connect to a murderer but you can connect to a man who is frying spaghetti. So when the man you just saw frying spaghetti goes out and shoots some one, you can connect to the murder too.

20. How much emotional distance do you think a director needs to keep while making a film?
Ans: I would say that he should concentrate on studying the emotions of the characters in terms of where from and how they are originating and he himself should not feel emotional as then there is a danger of him loosing his objectivity.

21. I admire your adaptation techniques of western art into our nativity.
Ans: From the examples you have quoted of “Rangeela”, “Sarkar” and “Shiva” you have to understand that it’s not from exactly a western art that I have taken that from but it’s from a western’s superior understanding of the human emotion and characteristics which is due to their higher intelligence and their intensity. That’s the reason why the atmospheric believability and the look of the characters is so much more effective in their films compared to ours.

For instance down below I am giving a passage from Fredrick Forsyth’s “The Afghan”. I do not believe that we here can ever hope to have the intensity or intelligence or the dramatic brilliance of that writer to write something like this in introducing a character.

“In Maryland the sun set. In the same time zone it was setting over Cuba and on the south-eastern peninsula known as Guantanamo a man spread his prayer mat, turned to the east, knelt and began his prayers. Outside the cell a GI watched impassively. He had seen it all before, many times, but his instructions were never, ever, to let his watchfulness slip.

The man who prayed had been in that jail, formerly Camp X-Ray, now Camp Delta, and in the media usually “Gitmo’ as short for Guantanamo Bay, for nearly five years. He had been through the early brutalities and privations without a cry or a scream. He had tolerated the scores of humiliations of his body and his faith without a sound, but when he stared at his tormentors even they could read the implacable hatred in his black eyes above the black beard”.

“In the room full of files kept by the interrogators as proof of their expertise, there was much about the man who prayed that night, but almost nothing from him”.

“After four years of torture the man at prayer was dubbed ‘non-cooperative’, which simply meant unbreakable. In 2005 he had been transferred across the Gulf to the new Camp Echo, a locked-down permanent isolation unit. Here the cells were smaller, with white walls and exercise only at night. For a year the man had not seen the sun.

No family clamoured for him; no government sought news of him; no lawyer filed papers for him. Detainees around him became deranged and were taken away for therapy. He just stayed silent and read his Koran. Outside, the guards changed while he prayed.

“Goddam Arab,’ said the man coming off duty. His replacement shook his head.

“He’s not Arab,’ he said. ‘He’s an Afghan.”

22. Did you ever watch movies in Lamba Talkies (Secunderabad)?
Ans: Yeah, I watched quite a few sex films there.