Ram Gopal Varma Blog #204. My Reactions to Reactions

1. Is pleasure the same as happiness?
Ans: Pleasure is more connected to the physical senses whereas happiness is a mental state. Pleasure would be during sex and happiness could be after sex.

2. What is failure according to you?
Ans: When you stop trying to be successful.

3. It’s not just cinema, any commodity in the market exaggerates its value.
Ans: The value of any true value is nothing but what you truly feel about its value.

4. Film-makers mostly think about impressing the audience.
Ans: The filmmaker should impress the audience but to be able to do that he himself has to be impressed with what he is intending to impress the audience with

5. Do you spontaneously come up with the different styles like in ‘Sarkar’, ‘Company’ etc.
Ans: Style always comes from within how, the Director wants to present the subject matter and the characters he is dealing with. For instance in ‘Satya’ there is a certain unpredictability in the characters so the camera work is designed to give an objective space to them and is never allowed to interfere with the actors performances. Whereas in ‘Sarkar’ pretty much the performances are designed for the camera framing as the film itself has a very specifically designed personality. If you pause any frame in ‘Sarkar’ or ‘Sarkar Raj’ at any given random moment a guy who just walks in can tell you which film it is if he has seen it.

6. The actors in your films convey their emotion instead of overacting and that’s the reason why your characters are remembered.
Ans: Overacting is when an actor emotes more than what the viewer in the theater feels was needed. But this could be subjective depending on the various parameters of the viewer.

A realistic character portrayal in Cinema more than in terms of his/her contribution to the overall story comes from their specific body language, speech pattern and facial expressions

That’s the reason you can enjoy watching an impactful character even in one scene even if you don’t watch the rest of the film.

7. Were films your only obsession in your childhood?
Ans: My first obsession was with reading stories, then I moved on to studying violence and it’s effects and then I was obsessed with super natural elements and then I discovered girls and then wisdom dawned upon me one day sitting in an Irani cafĂ© in Panjagutta that all my obsessions can be combined into that one sexy thing called Cinema, and ever since I didn’t stop fucking.

8. Have you ever tried to portray a character like you in your films.
Ans: All my Male characters have shades of me. Be it in the brooding intensity of Malik in ‘Company’ or the lecherous Rajpal Yadav in Khallas song in ‘Company’. They are all drawn out of a certain emotion which I felt sometime or the other in my life.

Likewise all the men characters created by me look at women the way I looked at them at various times and in various phases of my life.

9. If everyone starts to think like you, Mankind will end in less than 10 years.
Ans: I don’t care about the existence of mankind starting from one second after I die.

The world as I know will die after my death.

10. I don’t agree that without a Cinematic style of shooting them, films cannot be called Cinema.
Ans: Well most of the examples you mentioned are great stories that have been filmed but they cannot be called films. Atleast  that’s not my definition of films. But if that’s what films mean to you I am not going to argue.

11. Psychology is more interesting and truer than Philosophy.
Ans: Psychology is to con others and philosophy is to con ourselves.

12. Your blogs are both unsettling and re-assuring.
Ans: They will be unsettling because I am shaking the foundations of your belief system and they will be  reassuring because now you know that you should not have a foundation.

13. I think you live your life to the fullest.
Ans: I never met anyone who lives and loves life more fuller than me.

14. I wish I had known someone like you
Ans: Reading my blog is like having an affair with me whereas knowing me in person will be like a marriage. An affair anyday will be far more fruitful and enjoyable than marriage and you can ask any married/divorced man about that.

15. I exist because you imagine I do
Ans: No you don’t exist because I don’t imagine you as you are not worth my imagination and hence my existential imagination cannot existentially imagine you thereby resulting in your complete non existential existence.

16. Is Porn Filmmaking an art?
Ans: Any filmmaking is an art if the maker wishes it to be and presents it in his style. It’s not the content that constitutes art but it’s the way one wishes to see the content.

God or nature or whatever the hell it is that created woman and sex is a true fucking artiste man. Ahhhhhhhhh!

17. Who is Ramu?
Ans: Who you want him to be.

18. In every movie of yours there’s always a guy who has no dialogue and looks on like in  ‘Sarkar Raj’ it was a tall guy with a scar. In ‘Rann’ it was the minister’s assistant. In ‘Satya’ the long haired guy. Any funda on this one?
Ans:  It’s just that I love mysterious characters. I think it’s something I subconsciously picked up from a scene in ‘God Father – II’ where a guy is just sitting in a scene without any dialogue but he somehow  made the scene for me.

19. Is the movie fully only on Suri’s character as you seem to be to putting only Surya’s pics.
Ans: NO, Vivek’s portions I shot 5 months ago in RC-I and because of that I only put pics of Vivek. RC-II I just finished and because of that you are seeing only Surya’s pics

20. Film should be a dramatized fiction rather than a dramatized reality for reality is often dreary with no drama unlike in a film.
Ans: A film should be a dramatized version of fictional reality rather than a realistic drama as reality is often non dramatic and it cannot be filmed dramatically enough and so one has to fictionalize it to make dramatic sense out of it so that it won’t appear as nonsensical fiction thereby proving that I am talking fictional nonsense.

21. If you are to introduce yourself to someone who does not know you or your background which of these films would you mention that you are the Director between ‘Shiva’, ‘Rangeela’, ‘Satya’, ‘Company’, ‘Sarkar’.
Ans: ‘RAKTACHARITRA’. That’s because I genuinely feel that the only film I made in my life so far is Raktacharitra.

22. You are my God, Ramu.
Ans: Only when you truly understand that I am the devil can you realize that I am God.

23. I think you are a megalomaniac
Ans: I am much more.