BIG shot

Eight years and 12 films later,Ravi is much in demand in Mumbai. He has worked in Hindi,Malayalam,Kannada and the Tamil film industry,doing both arthouse and formula films,even commercials. In Dev.D and Gulaal,both ambitious,critically-acclaimed films,Ravi,as the director of photography,created some memorable imageswhether it is the graceless neon-lit environs of Delhi in the night,the stark red setting of a Rajput cult or a reinterpretation of Aditya Chopras clichéd mustard fields. He admits he has been lucky and that success has come to him easily.

In college in Cochin in the early 1990s,Ravi glutted on a steady dose of good literature,Marxist politics and later,cinema. I was the general-secretary of the Students Federation of India and was deeply involved in politics. Nobody suspected at the time that I would end up making films. They all thought I would take up law, he says. The Cochin Film Society introduced him to Jean Luc Godard and Satyajit Ray. He did a BSc in Physics and eventually landed up at the gates of the Film and Television Institute of India,Pune. The intention was always to be a director. I did not even take photos back then,and I am still bad at it. At the institute,Ravi was exposed to the best of international cinema and the man whose work influenced him deeply,Ritwik Ghatak. More lately,he has found inspiration in Wim Wenders road movies and Serbian Emir Kusturica. Cinema is a great visual language. When I look at a film,I see a visual narrative and I try to find a language of colours and images to tell the story, he says. 

After Chandni Bar,there were films such as The Bypass for which he collaborated with FTII associate and friend Amit Kumar and went on to win the Kodak Bafta awards for best film and best cinematography. There were also bigger projects like Anyar,Chakram,Classmates and Sesham in Malayalam,Haal-e-Dil 2008,and smaller ones like Lets Catch Veerappan a project he took on with Chak De! India director Shimit Amin,but had to shelve when they switched on the TV the second day to see the news of Veerappans killing. That was unfortunate because Shimit is one director with a lot of promise,someone whose presence you can feel behind a film. He has an artistic vision, he says.  

Ravis collaboration with Kashyap began with No Smoking,when the director was down and out with the ban on Paanch,his yet unreleased directorial debut. Part of the reason why this team still clicks is because of their spontaneous approach to film -making. I dont plan my shots. Similarly,Anurag does a lot of improvisation on the set. We dont discuss the script too much either. We just go and shoot, he says. Critics might have read revolution in Gulaals red-tinged scenes but Ravi had no such intent. I was just experimenting. One day,I smeared gulaal on an assistant directors face and looked through the camera. I thought it looked good and decided to frame Kay Kay in red light, he says.

Ravi is optimistic,though sceptical,of the surge of young filmmakers who claim to be changing the face of Hindi cinema. New cinema should bring in real change. Taking digs at the Karan Johar clan wont do. The problem with these young filmmakers is that they still want all their luxuries. They claim to be fighting from the inside,but there are many who have made that claim before. Malayalam films dealt with student politics in much more radical ways and that too in the 1970s, Ravi says. He says filmmakers have to break away from the producer-distributor-market set-up to make truly independent,subversive cinema.

As for his own script? He smiles. Were always making little films in our heads,arent we? But the kind of film I want to make would be one that documents life as it happens,with minimum intervention from the filmmaker,something similar to Nanook of the North.