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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
You enjoy the circus aspects of making films and yet say that you want to simplify your filmmaking process. How do you reconcile those two concepts?
My main work is to choreograph chaos. The chaos has to be choreographed perfectly so that you can capture it, but the planning has to be such that during the very act of shooting I want to be in a state of complete emptiness; sort of have a space in my brain so that it can happen and intuition can take over and can work with what's in front of me. That is a good example of the yin and yang of chaos and simplicity. You mastermind the chaos, you choreograph it and control it as best you can and then you expel it to the point where you can just let it all go and then see what happens and make the best out of what you've seen.
There are a lot of hand-held camera shots in the film. How did you work out the camera angles?
We workshopped the scenes for two weeks with the actors, and one week with the actors in the house. We designed the camera movements and shots and knew the blocking; that's what takes time. Everyone in front of the camera knew what they were going to do when we were going to shoot. So we took our positions and let the improvisation occur, but already knew what we were going to do because we'd achieved so much in so little time. Always the idea was not to do this myself and then just connect the dots. I would never just connect the dots, I always wanted to do it interestingly, not by rote. Why do that? The idea was always to be at play, but to be at play you had to be enormously prepared.
You come from a theatrical background, both as an actor and a director. How does your acting background inform your sensibility as a filmmaker?
I really love actors and I guess I know how to speak to them because I don't try to control them and tell them where I want them. My feeling is that each actor is an earnest human being and needs to think for himself or herself and I just respond to that person. Sometimes it takes one way and sometimes it takes another way and sometimes it takes imitation of what I'd do -- so often I work with nonprofessional actors.
Your screenwriter on this film, Sabrina Dhawan, was one of your teaching assistants in Columbia University's graduate film program. I've been impressed that you've mentored other women in your career. Was that a conscious effort?
Nothing pleases me more than to see interesting creative expression realized. That pleases me very much if it happens to come from women, but it's not conscious. In "Monsoon Wedding" we didn't set out to get a crew of 90 percent women. We just ended up with the best crew that happened to be women. That's fantastic.
You have become so prolific. It seems like you put out a film every year.
It's been a boom ever since I moved to New York. I've become a cosmic force, I did "The Laughing Club of India," "Monsoon Wedding" and "Hysterical Blindness" [premiering on HBO this spring] all in one year. I don't know what I'm doing next.
In closing, do you see any parallels between the success of "Moulin Rouge" and your own film? Did Moulin Rouge accomplish its goal of uniting Bollywood with the Western musical?
I don't think "Moulin Rouge" achieved the unabashed quality of Indian dance and emotion that is seen in Bollywood films. But I loved it. I couldn't compare it exactly to "Monsoon Wedding," which is a homemade Bollywood film, on my terms, not a classic Bollywood. But the classic Bollywood spectacle has a mystic and magical side that can be compared with "Moulin Rouge."
