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.
Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy is a Mumbai boy for all practical purposes, even though his parents are Tamil. He was born in the city, went to school there and has worked there all his life. A director of commercials for television, he claims he got into the media ‘quite by accident’. Vishwesh always had the ability to mimic people, and he could write, had a highly creative mind. He found that advertising was a place where he could use his talents to make some money.
As it turned out, he made a lot of money. By the time he was twenty-five, he had become a highly successful and respected ad film director. Confident and brash, Vishwesh has an eye for neo ultra-cool visuals. He’s also a great talker, has tons of references up his sleeve at any given point of time and also a certain warmth. It’s a combination that most guarantees you success in Mumbai’s advertising world, where attitude, PR skills and informed fast-talk reign supreme.
What probably attracted Rahman to him most though was the man’s core goodness—a trait that AR can sense very quickly in a person and with remarkable accuracy. Vishwesh is essentially the sort of fellow who will not be able to sleep a whole night after hearing of some tragedy that has befallen someone he knows.
As it so happens, Vishwesh is also a musician. He plays the guitar and has performed gigs to big audiences at venues across Mumbai and even in places as distant as Nagaland (seen by many as the musical capital of India).
Be it music, films or ads, Vishwesh’s tastes are entirely indie. His favourite range, when it comes to entertainment, is from off-beat to eccentric. In fact, the man has a bit of a disdain for traditional Hindi movies, for ‘Bollywood’ as it is called. He dislikes anything that is ‘establishment’. He hated school and thinks Indian entertainment—movies, music, TV series—‘mostly sucks’. ‘It’s all so commercial,’ he says. ‘No art in it.’
Rahman is the one Indian entertainer Vishwesh looks up to. AR, he says, is the only artist in the country who really ‘knows and respects’ his craft. ‘He’s a real artist,’ says Vishwesh. ‘The best we have.’
Vishwesh isn’t tall, but he is possessed of a belly that precedes him into any room he walks into and gives him a solid presence. He is also a great talker, full of endlessly fascinating stories and ideas. He is loud and has a strong opinion on nearly everything. ‘I guess I annoy a lot of people,’ he grins, summing himself up. ‘But that’s okay.’
The man is about as different from AR as you can imagine, but the two get along remarkably well. And their artistic sensibilities are quite similar. Some of the references AR showed him, for various portions and aspects of 99 Songs, would excite Vishwesh, while no other person in the room would get the subtleties they were talking about.
However, despite that he respects AR, Vishwesh holds his own against Rahman, tells him when he disagrees with an idea. And AR doesn’t mind that at all. In fact, he welcomes it.
AR appreciates it when someone disagrees with him, for a reasonable cause, and firmly argues their case. The way he sees it, this is a sign of someone who is passionate enough to stand up for what they believe in. He may or may not take their suggestions, but he’ll always hear them out.
‘You and your work have to keep being challenged,’ AR says. ‘That’s the only way you’ll stay grounded and get better.’
When AR first saw some of Vishwesh’s work back in 2012, he was intrigued. The idea to make a Hindi film was already there in earnest in AR’s mind. And something about Vishwesh’s ad films told AR that he would be the right fit for director.
So AR reached out to the younger man.
Their first conversation was, for want of another word, amusing.
AR called Vishwesh one day, out of the blue, and politely introduced himself. ‘Hi,’ he said, ‘This is A.R. Rahman speaking.’
‘Yeah, like hell it is,’ Vishwesh responded. ‘A.R. Rahman . . . Right. Nice try, but go get a life, buddy.’ And he hung up.
He’s not to blame—not entirely anyway. Vishwesh has a lot of friends who are top-notch mimics, and he thought it was one of them trying to prank him. ‘They do that quite often, some of them,’ Vishwesh says. ‘I thought this guy, whoever it was, was doing a damn good impression of Rahman. I didn’t think it was actually the man himself.’
AR called Vishwesh again. ‘No,’ he said, ‘This is really A.R. Rahman. This isn’t a joke.’
‘I still didn’t believe him,’ Vishwesh remembers. ‘I couldn’t imagine that A.R. Rahman would just pick up the phone and call me suddenly. But then the guy on the phone goes, “Okay, all right. Go to your computer. We’ll do a Skype call. Then you will know it’s me.” I said, “Cool.” I opened my laptop, ready to see one of those clowns I call friends, or nothing at all. But then, when I got on Skype, it was actually A.R. Rahman’s face on the screen.’
Vishwesh ‘flipped’, of course, but AR was quick to put him at ease.
AR then suggested that he and Vishwesh just meet first and ‘vibe together’ and see how it went from there. The two men bonded quickly. Vishwesh even performed on some of the music AR was making for a few films at the time, such as director Shankar’s Tamil film I.
AR could have asked any of the veteran directors he knows so well to make the film, surely. God knows he is friendly with several. And a number of them would’ve agreed to do it for him. But that might have caused complications. AR knew what kind of a movie he wanted. He had specifications in his mind and he needed someone who would not only deliver on that front, but also somebody with a young mind who could bring in new energy. Someone who had the courage to go against conventional Indian filmmaking and vet AR’s own ideas. And someone with a whole lot of personal talent too.
When it became clear that Vishwesh was up for directing AR’s movie, he started balancing out his advertising work with writing a script for the intended film.
Interestingly, AR did not have a locked story in his head for 99 Songs. He gave Vishwesh a list of elements that absolutely had to be in the film and told him to weave a screenplay around those elements. And these elements weren’t simply along the lines of ‘a strong romance’, ‘the significance of music’ and so on. Also on the list were ‘a mermaid’, a ‘drug trip’ and a bunch of other less-than-conventional specifications. (AR was ultimately talked out of the mermaid and a few other elements.)
It took Vishwesh and AR three years to go from writing the first draft of the script to starting actual production. Getting the story right was a process that was by turns wildly creatively stimulating and plain frustrating. There was no creative issue that was trifling or quickly resolved. Vishwesh had to rewrite the script about a dozen times. Each time he finished a version, he would send it to AR and then they would do a Skype or phone call, or meet in person in Chennai or Mumbai.
‘I used to hang around Panchathan for hours,’ Vishwesh recalls. ‘But it was pretty cool. Panchathan and YM and AM all have many grand pianos around.’ (‘Just to remind people I’m a musician,’ AR says jokingly.) ‘I was blown away by these. Those are heavy-duty, expensive instruments. I’d never even touched one before. So, all the nights I spent waiting to meet him, I used the time to teach myself to play them. I can play the piano fully now.’
AR kept adding or subtracting elements to and from the storyline. Sometimes he would make conflicting requests. He would agree to something at one meeting and then change his mind about it the next, after thinking it over. He would see something somewhere—a movie or a video—or hear a story or come across something over the course of his travels and say, ‘Let’s add something like that.’ The influx of ideas was endless.
It was tough dealing with AR’s constantly shifting requests for ‘the best possible story’ and for so long, but, as Vishwesh says, this sort of dynamism is what makes a good final product.
No doubt when Vishwesh agreed to direct the film, he was under the impression that in three years, he would be done with the project and be back in advertising full-time. But then things don’t always go according to plan.
You’ve got to hand it to the man though—he handled the situation beautifully, never once lost his temper or threw up his hands and said he’d had enough. Whenever AR had a suggestion, he would listen to it. If it was a valid point, he would work it into his script. If he felt it wasn’t, he would gently talk Rahman out of it. Sometimes AR would come back to him with the exact same idea again, and he would have to repeat the whole process.
Vishwesh had an entire wall in his home covered with notes that detailed the story flow of 99 Songs. ‘I’d written down every detail, how every single thing that happened in the movie led to the next event,’ says Vishwesh. ‘The cause and consequence of each scene.’
Each time AR suggested or requested an alteration, Vishwesh would have to change the note pertaining to it on his wall and watch the ripple effect, whether it would change another crucial part of the story, something AR himself had said was non-negotiable. If the alteration changed the story too much, resulted in a change in one of the ‘key scenes’ of the movie, Vishwesh would tell AR why the alteration he was asking for couldn’t be made.
‘The whole operation would take me five or six hours each time,’ says Vishwesh.
All said, if handling AR was a testament to Vishwesh’s brilliance, then choosing the man to helm 99 Songs was a testament to AR’s.
