About the aesthetic itself, I wanted to make this film because today what we see are filmmakers converting what is there in text to the screen through performances, delivering a story through the actors. They are not trying to reinvent cinema as a medium. I wanted to rely on cinematic aspects, conveying emotions only using composition, cuts, sound design. Dialogues too are part of the sound design — wall to wall dialogues through the three hours, full of human voices. I intentionally wrote more dialogues to make the sound design full of human voices. This is against what we see today as “cinema”.
Without seeing the eyes or lips, can you feel the anger and fear and excitement? Luckily we got a story that could be told through this manner.
Normally, filmmakers want to tell a story. You wanted to challenge cinema and found a story for that?
Yes, that is how I always work. Whenever I think of a basic plot, the first thing in my head is an edit pattern and sound design. Then I fill in the blanks. It should look like an epic film, but at the same time, through visuals and techniques, it should be abstract, too.
Time and space are both things that are incoherent and slippery in this film. It takes some time to settle into the incoherence of the film. How do you, as a writer, protect your film from becoming totally incoherent?
I am a person with a limited brain capacity. I come from a very religious family. My mother used to ask me to read the Bible. But whenever I read it, after two paragraphs I am totally out. I don’t understand what is happening. Sometimes there are 10-15 names in one paragraph itself. A lot of things are going on.
Even now when I am watching a film like KGF and other mainstream movies, I won’t understand a lot of things. I am more into the aesthetics of storytelling. My first brush with such a director was Ram Gopal Varma, because then, most filmmakers relied on storytelling, but RGV was doing quirky things with compositions and sound design. Even if I don’t understand the language and story of his movies, I understood what he was doing aesthetically.
Here, I intentionally wanted the audience to be confused throughout. At the same time, I want them to have a grip of the basic story. But the rest should be muddled, like a religious book. I always wondered why these books have so many subplots to say such simple things. So I used that same structure here. If you ask me to explain the story in one go, I would struggle.
Can you talk me through the labour of making this film? The time it took, the various layers that went into making an image, etc.
I took a lot of time to create this, two and a half years. There are 2,160 shots. It took almost one year to produce the songs and background score. Sometimes, to complete a 30-second stretch I would take two-three weeks.
There was so much work to be done, sometimes we even thought of dropping the film, because we had a lot of stories to tell and after sitting for a long time we would create very less. It felt like an impossible task after a while. Even after making the film, I never thought anyone would appreciate it, watch it.
What about the images? There is photography and shadow-play. What were the layers you were working with?
I wanted each shot to be minimal, but I wanted the editing and music to be over the top. Most of the screen is black — close-ups of characters who are silhouettes.