‘Filmmakers not relying on literature, they are watching films making another movie from it’

It was as a part of the lecture, titled “Novel to Script”, that Jeyamohan spoke of the present, disturbing trend in filmmaking. “It is rare to see a fresh theme in modern art movies. Filmmakers are creating movies with regular politically correct themes of world movies. They are creating a fresh version of the same five or six themes. As a writer, I am extremely bored to see such films. If you want to create something fresh, you have to go to literature. There is a lot of good writing in Kannada, Marathi, Urdu, Bengali and Malayalam and Tamil literature,” said Jeyamohan.

Jeyamohan’s lecture, like a good film, kept the hall in a grip. He began with dry humour. “I’m skeptical of my linguistic abilities in English, particularly while I’m talking to Indian people,” he said. He is a Tamil writer but his mother tongue is Malayalam. “I write in both languages but my mind is actually made up of Tamil. So, while I’m talking English I am translating from Tamil automatically. It’s a tough thing,” he said.

Between talking films, he spoke on his parents’ suicide, his own experience travelling the country as a beggar. “I roamed the country as a beggar for two years. I witnessed a murder and from that, the novel Yelam Ulgam and the film Naan Kadaul were made,” he said.

Young filmmakers and a large number of students packed three-quarters of the seats, hanging on to the words of the legend who had been writing for films for two decades. “I wrote for big movies in Tamil and, maybe, I am one of the highly paid screenwriters in India. So, I am happy about it,” he said.

Over an hour, he took the hall into a deep dive of great works of literature—commercial and literary –and the films made on them for better or worse. He spoke about his long-term collaborator, Mani Ratnam, and how Kadal that he wrote turned into an expensive film and “was a disaster”. “Mani Ratnam was the producer of the film. He lost nearly Rs 20 crores. But, today, after 15 years, a lot of people, particularly intellectuals, are celebrating Kadal as a classic of Tamil cinema,” he said. This year, he is publishing the written version of that novel. The intense speech gave glimpses of the making of Ponniyin Selvan, the blockbuster made by Ratnam and adapted by Jeyamohan from a historical epic.

The lecture ended with Jeyamohan giving a number of tips to the screenwriters and scriptwriters in the audience, including counter-intuitive ones like to never follow the storyline of a novel. “Because the story line of a novel is entirely different, never use the dialogues of a novel in the movie, and you should not follow the philosophical discourse of a novel in the movie” “A movie is not a medium of discourse. While watching a movie, you have no time to discuss that movie,” he said.

Talking to The Indian Express after the lecture, Jeyamohan dismissed the threat of AI. “I am writing for big movies. We are theorising big graphic scenes and digitally modified scenes. When AI was introduced, we began to use it. But, we discovered that AI can give you a standard that people are already accustomed to. You have to create something new, only then will people appreciate your film. So, we are not using AI except to create a storyboard,” he said.