Das Gespräch wurde auf Englisch geführt.
Barbara Wurm (BW): Welcome, Gowtham. I'm extremely honoured to have your film in our lineup. I’d like to start by asking you to kindly describe your journey to becoming a filmmaker.
R. Gowtham (RG): Thank you. It took quite a long time, actually. I was preparing for competitive exams for the civil services for a while. I had plenty of time to watch movies and read literature. People at home were hoping to see me as a government official, but I wasn’t doing that. I was totally into stuff like ANDREI RUBLEV (1966), 8½ (1963), the film magazine ‘Sight and Sound’, and the website ‘They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?’. I was downloading things through torrents. I didn't pass the exams, not even the preliminaries. But the exposure to literature and movies helped. I went on to study journalism and made some short documentaries. After that, I made this film. I had multiple other jobs before becoming a filmmaker.
BW: Since you didn’t have connections to film schools or the industry, what did it take for you to get together all the people and equipment to start this project?
RG: The people who made this film, we’re a bunch of talkative guys. We’d always talk about making things, but never actually do anything about it. So much so that people would ridicule us for our empty talk. We could’ve spent our entire lifetime in a tea shop talking. But then, PEBBLES (2021, directed by P.S. Vinothraj) happened, and its international success gave us the confidence that we could go out and make something. I convinced my childhood friend to put in the money. It was more difficult than convincing a regular producer, but it happened. We didn’t have any hands-on experience; we just went ahead and shot.
BW: But you're working with actors, not with non-professionals, right?
RG: It's a mix. Ajith Kumar, who plays Prabha, is from the theatre. So is Karuththadayan, who plays Sellam (and the lead in PEBBLES). A couple of them are movie actors, a few others non-professionals. I didn’t give instructions to the actors; it was rather an art of negation. ‘Don’t do this’, ‘I don’t want this’… I didn’t go for too many takes either. One or two were enough for me. You can't push non-professionals too much; they would be unnerved and would refuse to perform. So we used to pre-roll before the actual action. That's how we were able to grab certain emotions.
BW: How many days did you shoot altogether?
RG: We shot for 27 days, but the bulk of it was done in 8 to 10 days. Other days were for preparation. There was another section that we shot, a kind of genesis that tells the backstory, but we didn't include it in the movie.
BW: What about the script and its relation to the preparations? What did you give the actors and what does the script look like with respect to the structure of the film?
RG: It was conceptualised as a four-part work, and we didn’t change anything. This script was decent, I would say, but not conventional. There’s no save-the-cat template or things like that. I thought, let’s treat it as a kind of novella. A single line was equivalent to a shot. It wasn’t formatted like a screenplay. I wasn’t too worried. I had Andrei Tarkovsky’s book ‘Sculpting in Time’ (1985) next to me; I was re-reading passages from it. We were praying. We thought this would be like a cinematic prayer and let the movie find its way.
We thought this would be like a cinematic prayer and let the movie find its way.
Srikanth Srinivasan (SS): Your production company is called Labyrinth Narratives, and your film is quite a labyrinth in itself, with so many characters, locations and situations. We get the feeling of being dropped into a world of which we can only have a partial glimpse. We follow these characters, but we're not sure about their relationships. We spend the whole film trying to map them, but we may never arrive there. We’d like to know about your approach to designing this world, which seems full of absences and gaps. Could you talk to us about this choice to not explain the backstory of each character to the audience?
RG: I have this inability to tell stories. I can't narrate linearly. When I explain something, there are always jump cuts. My mentors tried to instil a sense of focus in me. They would say, ‘Hold on, think clearly and talk about one thing at a time. Try to focus.’ I did try, I would go on walks and jogs, I tried to focus. But my stream of thoughts was always jumpy. So I just wanted to be true to myself; the film had to look like me. I didn’t set out to convince others. I just wanted to convince myself. I felt that if it convinces me, it can convince others too. It had to be personal. I was also thinking of the concept of defamiliarization in poetry, making the familiar unfamiliar, finding new forms and techniques, and so on. But majorly, I gave three words to the team members: sketchy, doubtful, and incomplete. It comes from a collection of Goethe’s jottings. Somehow, that was in my mind. I was always telling people, the movie had to be sketchy, incomplete, and doubtful. Whenever they came to understand something, I would say, ‘No, we are not going to do this’. But then, while shooting, you realize that you still have to go out there and tell a concrete story. You still have to find clean shots. You have to have the same control, exercise the same directorship. So that's how the structure was. I just wanted it to be fragments from the life of this guy, Prabha. I didn’t want to give more information that would justify his behaviour. I had shot 25 minutes worth of material about the days when Prabha wasn’t drunk, just before his death. But I completely removed that because it was turning into a kind of self-explanation. It was giving importance to my life. I could sense that I’m justifying my own existence with those 25 minutes. I felt that this part was damaging the rest of the film. When I pulled it out, it felt perfect.
SS: You begin your film with an extended funeral sequence, almost 30 minutes long, shot in real locations with real people and featuring real rituals. Why did you want to treat it in such elaborate detail?
RG: I’ve always had this morbid fascination with funerals. To be frank, I’ve been witnessing funerals ever since I was a kid; deaths and funerals have been constant in my family. I’ve seen some grand funerals, those of chief ministers and ex-chief ministers. In Tamil Nadu, India, funerals of movie stars bring huge crowds who come to pay tribute. Over here, people fantasize about having large crowds at their own funerals. But I didn’t want to show a grand, cracking funeral in the film. I wanted to present a sober, matter-of-fact funeral. Nothing happens, yet something is happening. It was initially 40 minutes long, and we trimmed it down to what it is now. I tried to trim further, but it began to feel truncated. It wasn’t the same thing anymore. So I let it be. I’d also like to mention Alejandro Jodorowsky's SANTA SANGRE (1989), which features an elephant's funeral. I’ve never seen a funeral like that on screen. Funeral for an elephant! It’s astonishing. I’ve translated Jodorowsky's interviews for the Tamil magazine ‘Manal Veedu’. So it’s a small tribute to the old man. He has a face that resembles my grandfather’s. Had he been born in India, I would’ve cast Jodorowsky as the grandfather in the film.
Had he been born in India, I would’ve cast Jodorowsky as the grandfather in the film.
BW: What about Tarkovsky? Who would he be?
RG: Tarkovsky is very strict. Aki Kaurismäki, Anurag Kashyap, Mysskin are all my maternal uncles. Their relationship with me would be like the one between Dinesh and Sellam in the film, cordial, lovely. Vetrimaran and Tarkovsky would be father figures. They are paternal uncles. With them, it would be like the relationship between Mugil and Sellam. We wouldn’t get along that well.
BW: Can I ask you something in relation to the funeral again? We actually had discussions about the question of whether this film is about grief or not. My impression was that the more we see the funeral, the rituals and everybody's different emotions, the less space there is for grief as such. Is it something that you also wanted to capture, that due to the overload of rules and rituals, the actual emotion that should take place, namely grief, is a bit lacking?
RG: Grief depends upon the person whom we have lost. With loved ones, it becomes hard to go through these very long rituals because the emotions overwhelm you. If I had to cremate my friend, I would collapse right there. But with Prabha’s death, I felt it was a relief for him and for his family. Even so, they still have to do the rituals, which they do reluctantly, very mechanically. They are not doing it out of love. Nobody is really mourning, except one guy who, during the cremation, wants to hug and kiss Prabha’s body, and pour liquor on it. Basically, for the family, grief has been drained out. They were all furious with Prabha when he was alive, they are sort of relieved now. Also, they don't want to have any issues with the police, with a possible inquiry about his sudden death. So they aren’t immediately preoccupied with the loss of a dear one. At least, not during the funeral. That comes later. For the mother, grief sets in only after 16 days.
SS: One aspect of this is that each character has a different attitude towards the dead man. Could you talk to us about these varied characterizations?
RG: The family in the film is similar to my own family. I’ve simply drawn from them. Some are direct copies, some others are composite characters, made from several of my family members. I had short notes describing the dead man’s relationship with everyone. We were very clear about who would be mourning and who wouldn’t. We were particular about characters’ behaviour during the shoot, who would be smiling, who would be stern.
SS: What about Prabha himself? What was your conception of the character?
RG: Prabha is an errand boy to the whole family. He feels that he runs the family. He wants to succeed his dead father as the head of the house, and take over the shops. He has a talent for sports and is very good at heart. But his alcoholism is disruptive. When he is drunk, he’s unable to run his regular errands, like dropping Sellam’s son, Thaen, to school. This enrages Sellam, who isn’t into family life very much and who now has to drive Thaen to school himself. But how did Prabha start drinking? By watching his uncles and other adults, who didn’t do anything to stop or rehabilitate him. They just wanted him to be the errand boy. Suddenly one day, when he is older, Prabha realizes he is a nobody, while all his cousins have moved ahead in life. His fantasy of taking care of the whole family is not going to happen. We even had a climactic scene, just as he is dying, when Prabha realizes this and says ‘Oh, mother, I'm a fool.’ We didn’t include it. SS: Watching Prabha near those waters, I got a sense that there may be mental health issues at play too. RG: The prolonged alcohol dependency gradually takes it to that level. The family treats him like an incurable drunkard who is happy hanging around the liquor shop and who doesn’t want to take up a real job. But alcohol isn’t the problem, it’s just a symptom. No one in his family wants to find answers. Prabha is great at taking care of people, but he doesn’t know how to be financially useful. He would have been a respected individual 20-30 years ago in a bigger, extended family because others would go to work. Prabha would have kept the family together. With his death, he is ultimately going to do that. At least, I felt so. He is dead, and the whole family now rallies around this single figure.
Prabha is great at taking care of people, but he doesn’t know how to be financially useful.
SS: There’s a good deal of physical and verbal abuse that we witness within the family, especially between Prabha and his mother Santhi during the flashback. But there's also a strong undercurrent of love. How did you come up with this dynamic between the family members that is laced with both love and abuse?
RG: There’s an element of proxy love between mother and son. Santhi has lost her husband and she’s looking for someone to take care of, like a little puppy. With Prabha grown up and gone astray, it is Thaen, Sellam’s young son, whom she virtually raises. For his part, Prabha wants to take over his father’s authority at home. He is jealous of Thaen and views him as competition to be eliminated. He wants to regain his lost position with his mother. To be sure, he loves Thaen, but when he is drunk, this love collapses. Santhi is certainly angry at Prabha, but she loves him too. She has pampered him, and she's also a reason for his alcoholism. As for the verbal abuse, I thought I had trimmed it down! But swearing is common in my family. That's how we speak. We begin swearing at a young age. But it isn’t done with malice. The writer Perumal Murgan wrote a series of essays titled ‘Ketta Varthai Pesuvom’ (‘Let's Swear’, 2013), where he discusses how profanity and sexual references have been denied entry into the lexicon by cultural gatekeepers. As a result, we don't have proper dictionary entries for Tamil expletives. But in contemporary literature, their usage is very common. When making the film, it wasn’t my goal to impose it consciously; it just happened. The use of expletives felt natural until somebody pointed it out to me.
BW: Your film is so full of energy and going in many directions at the same time. There’s a huge authenticity that you create. I think the montage plays a big part in that. Could you tell us more about the way you edited? While shooting, did you already plan the edit?
RG: No, I cannot previsualize things. I didn't know how to put two things together in my mind. It was all separate. I didn’t know which image would follow a given image. I never had that sense. But during the shoot, I tried to learn that. I didn’t want multiple angles for coverage, but still took them since the editor and the cameraman asked for it. During the edit, however, I used only what I originally wanted. While making my short documentaries, I would watch hours of footage and take notes. But with this film, I got the first cut ready quickly since I knew what I had captured. We never had to work it out. We had the flow; we had the script. We just placed the shots accordingly and it happened.
SS: You make it sound simple, but you even cut within scenes, jumping across places.
RG: I’ve always wanted to show what multiple characters are doing at a given time. For instance, during a scene with Prabha and the old man at the salon, we briefly see Shanti at home. I wanted to show that this is the only time that Shanti will get to eat at her own pace. The parallel cutting helped me go back and forth. Some of it was in the script, some of it decided during the edit.
I’ve always wanted to show what multiple characters are doing at a given time.
SS: You often invoke literature. Your film has a table of contents, a preface, chapters, an epilogue, even a bibliography. What is your relationship with literature and why did you want to structure your film like a book?
RG: As part of my work with ‘Manal Veedu’ and other magazines, I’ve been editing and proofreading texts for a very long time. That’s the only format I know! I just adapted it to film.
SS: I find the dream-like ending extremely moving, this decision to bring back Prabha and give him his due, a kind of rehabilitation that he didn’t have in life.
RG: We enjoyed shooting the scene, the kind of everyday conversation that Prabha must’ve had with the old man during his sober days. We wanted to end on an auspicious note after all this chaos.
SS: You open the film with a mysterious and beautiful quotation: ‘Ash, the colour of our times.’ What does it mean to you?
RG: Ash, it’s neither black, nor white, but grey. It’s also related to cremation, funerals. There’s something sacred about it too, the holy ash that everyone in my family wears on the forehead before bed. The line, ‘Ash, the colour of our times’,‘Saambal Nam Kaalathin Niram’, is from a powerful poem called ‘Anthems of Resurrection’, by Sabarinathan, a contemporary poet who has translated Tomas Tranströmer into Tamil. There are many like him. I wanted this film to contain this little representation of all those tireless cultural workers, the translators, the little magazine guys. They don't earn anything; they don't get any credit. They simply write, translate for us, and it doesn't go anywhere else. This film is a small hat tip to all those who work for the Tamil art and cultural landscape.
