Kamal Haasan “The fact that I’ve lived this long is not really an achievement, Time passes; we age… it’s natural. This is why it annoys me when a person watches a movie and tell me that it was ‘time pass’. Would time not have passed if he hadn’t watched the film?”...
Vivien Leigh — the Scorn that Won the World “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! Come, Helen, come, give me my soul...
This was around 1955. Ritwik Ghatak was in Bombay, sharing his living quarters with Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Producer Shashadhar Mukherjee had him employed at Filmistan Studios, writing stories and scripts for them. Ritwik had just been married to Surama Bhattacharjee....
Out of the twelve films Richard Attenborough directed in his lifetime, seven were biographical pictures, a genre that has come to be labeled as the ‘biopic’. In a marathon interview given to John Gallagher in the year 1992, Attenborough explains his fixation with the...
“I have never been to a cinema. But even to an outsider, the evil that it has done and is doing is patent. The good, if it has done any at all, remains to be proved.” “If I Was Made Prime Minister… I Would Close All the Cinemas and Theatres.” “If I had my way, I...
Shabana Azmi Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety These lines from Antony and Cleopatra, originally woven by the Bard of Avon to sing a paean to the Egyptian queen, seem apt for Shabana Azmi. There is an unwritten norm that most...
Which author holds the distinction of being the most adapted writer in the cinema of India? Shakespeare? Tagore? Premchand? Or, perhaps, Dharmvir Bharati? We Indians have never demonstrated excessive love for adaptations. Thus, if one were to list the most iconic...
Even before Satyajit Ray made history with his first film ‘Pather Panchali’ in 1955, he had written a script based on Rabindranath Tagore’s novel published in 1916, “Ghare Baire” (The Home and the World) [1], that was to have been directed by a friend Harisadhan...
“Idhu namma kaalam. Ezhundhu vaa!” (lit. “This is our time. Arise & Arrive”) Dialogue from Pa. Ranjith’s Sarpatta Parambarai, which revolves around boxing, a bloody, violent sport and identity of clan prestige. Mahatma Gandhi epitomised non-violence as a...
When I was completing the edit of my film ‘Remembering Bimal Roy’ on my father, my editor asked me who would do the final sound design. This was the first time I heard the term sound design and realised that my documentary would need one. Shajith By sheer...
