Coming home to Mahatma

Those were the early days when there was a lot of unhappiness over Hindi being `imposed’ as the national language. Kamal went to see a film called Padosan. “It was a film made by a North Indian poking fun of Tamilians and we went in as rabble rousers.” They would disrupt the proceedings to register their protest.

Nothing happened because Kamal fell in love with Mehmood, and the medium. The film grabbed him and left him stunned. Entering the profession as a technician, he always wanted to make films. It just took some years to establish himself as an actor before he launched himself as a director.

To tell stories. Through the language of cinema.

But today, he is in a Catch 22 situation. “I was telling different stories. And people have come to expect that. So if I were to do a simple film they would probably reject it.” So Kamal makes films that appeals to the purse strings as well as the intellect though he is careful to maintain that he makes “commercial films”. “I need the money,” he declares.

In the early years they were a part of a movement. Directors like Mani Ratnam and he were out to make the middle-of-the-road films. Films that would be commercially viable and called good cinema. Kamal drew on his influences, chiefly American directors who could be loosely called the new wave of Hollywood. “Francis Ford Coppola is a big influence. I think The Godfather is as good as Citizen Kane though people may disagree.”

His curriculum also included directors like V Shantaram, Ritwik Ghatak, Alfred Hitchcock and Shyam Benegal. “Benegal introduced me to Satyajit Ray,” something that Kamal would have never touched had Benegal not insisted.

Today, they chip in to help him as a creative whole and at the same time tell his stories as he expands the medium, be it in the content or the form. Which explains his continuous experiments with different aspects of cinema. Especially when it comes to the threat from Hollywood.

“There are a few of us defending the bridge. But I think we know how to fight. We can achieve a grand alliance where we look after each others interests.” That is his prescription for the Hollywood menace, something that the French have been trying to counter for a long time.

At the risk of sounding parochial, Kamal breathes the essence of cultivating regional cinema. “When we were fighting against Hindi it was for a cause. It would have turned us all illiterate overnight.” To save one’s culture, Kamal believes that the future lies in cinema. But Hindi cinema gets the long berth. He got tired of the indiscipline and the style of functioning and decided to head homeward. “I believed in making one film at a time. Here, people worked on numerous films at the same time and quality suffered. Since I have only so much time I went back to Tamil Nadu to do the films that I wanted to make.”

So he took the next best option. Make the films in both the languages. Indian became Hindustani, Avvai Shanmugi became Chachi 420 in the Hindi avtaar and so on. Creatively, the man wants to achieve a lot more. A million roles that need to be explored and a million psyches to be sifted through. But, for now, it is back to Gandhi. Another page of the script turns as he sifts through the man’s life to tell his story. “It is an ariel view… a much broader view than in Indian. Of course, we will have to look over the protagonist’s shoulder, but it will talk about the India I know. A post-independent India that I grew up in.” There he works. Shush.