PachydermTales

“I think it began when I was a little boy. My father used to drive me through the Nilgiri mountains where we would see these huge animals walking about slowly minding their business and I would just stare at them in awe,” he says,adding,“In fact my father taught me an interesting way of catching them. Using a pair of binoculars,tweezers and a Jam jar. He would say,look at the animal from the wrong end of the binocular and then pick it up using the tweezers and put it in a Jam jar.”

Having made films like The Elephant Men,River Monsters and Headhunters of WW-II,Marshall was in town as a part of the Vasundhara Film Festival and had come down on an invite by the British Council Library. Having been born and bought up in India he has not been a stranger to the varied cultures of the country.

Marshall does however mention that history and natural wild life are subjects that are very close to his heart. He says,“In fact when I began almost 30 years back,I did not even know what films I wanted to make. So I travelled through India on a shoestring budget. That was when I knew about my calling. There were so many stories waiting to be told. From the animals of a particular region to the people there,everything was intertwined like a giant web of human cultures.”

On his future plans Marshall says that he would love to make a commercial film in India revolving around his favourite animal. “It would be a fun idea to tell their story from their own point of view. Probably call it,The Elephant Diaries or something like that,” he says,with the mysterious five-year-old gleam in his eyes.