The article which appears below was originally published in Krishna Tiloks's book, Notes Of A Dream. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
Most people taking their first steps into the world of movie-making start out by doing a short film. Or a documentary. Something along those lines.
Not A.R. Rahman.
As with everything else the man has done, his initiation into the realm of telling stories on the big screen is bold, grand.
Rahman’s arrival into the movie scene comprises three highly varied films: the live-concert film One Heart, the virtual reality (VR) film—or experience, as AR likes to refer to it—Le Musk and the feature-length Hindi musical 99 Songs.
One Heart is, in many ways, the most straightforward of the three movies. The one you might most associate with a man of music, arguably. Much like Michael Jackson’s This Is It or One Direction’s This Is Us, the work documents Rahman performing some of his most popular numbers with an ensemble of singers and musicians, while on tour in the United States.
Fifteen songs are featured, including ‘Endrendrum Punnagai’ from Mani Ratnam’s Alaipayuthey, ‘Tere Bina’ from the same director’s Guru and ‘Nadaan Parindey’ from Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar. The film is also peppered with intimate interviews, from members of the band and from the composer himself, as well as footage of rehearsals for the shows. It also shows Rahman and his singers and musicians blowing off steam off-stage, enjoying themselves in various American cities, going to restaurants or just sitting around and chatting.
A lot of people tend to forget that AR appreciates human contact as much as anyone else. Even the folks who work with him, for him, are sometimes unnerved by the notion of being around AR, because of who he is. Most of them talk to him in hurried, hushed whispers about only what he absolutely must hear—business and schedules and such. Some, like Ranjit Barot, Mani Ratnam and a few of AR’s friends from his days in advertising, are able to talk to him as equals, but they are few. And they aren’t always around.
Sure, Rahman wants to talk to people, and he does make an effort to reach out to whoever he is working with, whenever he isn’t pressed for time. But the thing is he’s so shy at first and people are so overawed by him that real contact is rare and/or at least takes a while.
‘I do think he feels like he is alone sometimes,’ says Rajiv Menon.
Le Musk is a very special film, the first VR film to be made by an Indian. The movie is, essentially, a mystery about how a young woman, whose parents were murdered, uses her sense of smell to find the killers and exact revenge. AR wrote the script himself—after a conversation with his wife, Saira, who is a big fan of perfumes.
The final product will be released in three segments of fifteen minutes each.
Le Musk was shot primarily in Rome and on sets in Chennai and Los Angeles. It stars French singer–actress Nora Arnezeder and English actor Guy Burnet.
Despite the fact that production started much before 99 Songs did, work on Le Musk continued long after the latter finished shooting in late 2017. This is mainly because VR is still unexplored territory, world over.
The camera used to shoot VR footage looks like a ball studded with lenses. All the lenses record content and then the images that have been captured by each one have to be ‘stitched’ together so as to create the illusion that a viewer, wearing his VR goggles, is actually living in the scene that has been shot.
Le Musk is a complex project. The stitching alone is a herculean task. And to top it all, there is no way of telling if the end product will be at all like what its makers envision it to be. To add to what is already a quagmire, AR wants the final movie to be a ‘5D experience’ that will engage all the human senses, including smell and touch. Special chairs that will release odours and offer sensations will have to be constructed and installed in specialized viewing chambers (as the film cannot be screened in traditional theatres).
‘AR brought in VR,’ Rahman says with a grin. ‘That’d be a pretty cool tagline, right?’
As of late 2017, the plan for the screening of Le Musk involves AR floating a new company in LA called VIRA. If all goes according to plan, VIRA will operate a fleet of large vans fitted with VR-film screening facilities that will tour the US and show Le Musk. That’s the plan anyway—but it may very well change in days to come.
In fact, by early 2018, they were once again talking about showing Le Musk in a theatre setting, albeit one that would have to be specially constructed from scratch.
It is easy for one to get freaked out a little by VR when one first experiences it. When you strap on the headset, you are transported right into the video you are watching—literally. You feel a bit like a ghost or an invisible man. You can look down and you won’t see your body. You can raise your hands, but you won’t see them. It takes a little getting used to.
But AR is delighted about this technology. ‘Movies used to linger in your mind after you saw them in the early days,’ he says. ‘3D used to linger when it first came. But now we’re used to it. VR is the next game-changer we’re waiting for. The scenes are going to stay in your head for days. You’re not going to be able to get them out of your head.’
Will some people get weirded out by the experience?
AR shrugs off the possibility. ‘One of the earliest films ever made had a train coming towards the camera. The audience got scared and ran out of the hall thinking it was a real train and that it was going to burst out of the screen and crash into them. But look at films and audiences now. People can get used to anything.’
The third Rahman movie, 99 Songs, is theoretically the closest of his three projects to a traditional Indian film, also the one closest to AR’s heart. It is a love story and a musical, simple and reminiscent of Damien Chazelle’s 2016 hit La La Land.
‘It’s a fairy tale,’ AR keeps saying.
The film is also a tribute to the power of music, to the power of love and to the intrinsic goodness of human nature. While the basic storyline itself is simple and moving, the scale of the telling is impressive, with several jaw-dropping set pieces and song sequences, à la the 2017 Hugh Jackman–starring musical, The Greatest Showman. It promises to be something truly unique.
Once the ideas for the three movies were conceived, there was one very fundamental and practical question to be addressed before all else: Who was going to make these films?
One Heart of course needed no director, given that it was made up of footage from cameras around stages that was edited together. Simple enough.
Le Musk, AR directed himself. The composer got behind the (freaky) camera and drove the making personally.
With 99 Songs though, the case was slightly different. Being a much larger movie, longer and more complex to actually shoot than the other two projects, it needed to be approached differently. AR realized early on that it wasn’t going to be possible for him to direct the picture himself. He would write the story and have a final say on how the movie was going to look and feel, but the actual shooting of the film, he knew, would take months. There was also the question of overseeing post-production. Right from the onset, it was clear that 99 Songs was going to be heavy on the visual effects. And then there was editorial to take care of.
All of this was going to require time—time that AR could not possibly give. Taking off for a few weeks over the course of several months to shoot his VR ‘experience’ was one thing. But this was another matter entirely.
No, AR realized, he would need a director who could help him with his first full-length feature movie.
Enter Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy.
