How Satyajit Ray Directs a Film | The Director's Chair

i had become fascinated with india really from movies um particularly the movies of satyajit ray the filmmaker sacha de rey ray is one of my masters he's one of the filmmakers whose work i've returned to i keep his films with me all the time and when i want to be focused again i go back to them [Music] what interests me is density how much can you tell how telling can you make your images [Music] i like simple themes simple emotional situations and i think simple things are more universal than complex ones [Music] it's all a

matter of telling the story in the best possible way let's go [Music] looks like grand budapest [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] i was born in a place called garfaar road in a printing press actually in fact it was a huge building which housed the printing and block making department which my grandfather had started and i spent the first six years of my life in that place i remember songs and singing a great deal because my mother used to sing very well sketching painting drawing i had it at the back of my mind while i was in

college or even late school that i would be a professional artist doing perhaps some kind of commercial art the cinema came of course much later we were exposed to both western and eastern culture at the same time i used to read the comics and everything so i grew up in that kind of atmosphere where both western sort of influences and the normal indigenous influences work i think in my early school days i had my main interest with stars i was really a film fan and i used to read magazines like photo play and film pictorial

and things like that but then gradually i think early years in college i became more and more interested in the directorial aspect of filmmaking i became aware of the director and i was reading up on people like john ford burns lubitz william weiler frank capra and looking for their speciality in the film they're their sort of special characteristics they were very very well crafted films so my education really is based on these extremely well-written well-directed well-shot well-acted films of the 30s and 40s mr jean renoir the french director in 49 i think he came to

calcutta to look for locations for the river i was an advertising man at that time and it so happened that the agency where i worked was quite near the hotel where he was saying so i just went and presented myself as a student of the cinema and i got to know him quite well because he was comparatively free at that time in the evenings and i would often sort of drop in and that was very very important for me the talks that i had with him even before i had seen his french films renoir told

me why don't you make assuming you're so interested why don't you give up what you're doing and go into filmmaking i said well i have an idea to make this kind of a film and i described the story he said do it it sounds marvelous this was uh on his first visit it was only after i decided on patrick after reading the book when i illustrated it that the idea of turning that into a film and directing myself occurred to me so that was that so i am a product of both east and west almost

equally but as a filmmaker my roots are deep in india the first film had no proper script because i the film was made while i still had my advertising job and it was all in my head it was shot on weekends frankly speaking over a period of two years two years because for long stretches we had no money i had to be very economical then i decided that i will make this film with amateurs i am an amateur myself i'll have an amateur cameraman well this young boy was about 21 22. but we believed in

certain things a certain approach to photography if you want to be economical you have to be disciplined you have to pre-plan to a considerable extent and so everything is very carefully planned in my films my shooting ratio incidentally is four to one it's been that all the way through there are certain things that are dictated by circumstances for instance when one makes a film about contemporary calcutta one would one should ideally shoot on location in actual interiors shooting on location in a city urban location can be held absolutely i have had this experience many many

times but streets we cannot build in the studio so we have willy-nilly to shoot in the streets no matter how many thousands of people gather to watch and get in the way of your work [Music] nobody would put up any money and they said you can't shoot film why did they say that well i said that you can't shoot on location you have to be shooting in the studio you have to have the lights under your control i mean the sun is very undependable and you can't shoot in there any season and you can't do

this you can't do that you can't work with amateurs you can't all sorts of you know don'ts and cards and also that but then what i did was that i borrowed a 16 millimeter camera and i took some footage myself under the worst possible light conditions shooting early before sunrise after sunset been pouring rain and it all came out but by october i think it'll be much better because we won't have these flossing clouds both of us were great admirers of katya berson and we believed in available light and we aimed at simulating available light

in the studio by using bounce light with the second film when we had to shoot interiors in the studio supposedly houses in banaras where there was a central courtyard with no roof on top and the light all came from the sky [Music] and it was a kind of top lighting that we started using bounce lighting with cloths stretched over and the lights bounced back from that except for night scenes where there is a source of light established and you you follow that source as much as possible if it's candle if it's lantern if it's electric

light you follow the source it simplifies things you know i think about seven or eight years after that i read an article in the american cinematographer by sven nyqvist this was at the time of through a glass darkly i think saying that they had invented [Music] bounce lighting but we've been doing it since ever since night and since 1953-54 one thing i believe in is that a certain mood can be enhanced by certain states of nature which again dictates certain qualities of lighting for instance the latter part of pathetic majority was shot in the rainy

season in very bleak kind of weather and it affects you i think it affected the unit it affected the actors and it helped their acting the performance because they were unified with the natural setting with the mood of lighting et cetera and also in april i think the latter part of the film were all shot on cloudy days with no sunlight at all very gray monochromatic very great one uses uh different methods with different actors it's never a set method with any actor i've kept it sort of flexible i get to know the person and

then i use a certain method which i think will work best in terms of that particular actor ever since my first film i've used both professionals and non-professionals and also people who'd never face the camera or never even thought of facing the camera when i write my scenario each character i can sort of visualize and i look for people for faces which conform to my visual conception of an actor and if i find a professional who fits the part i take it professional if not then i start looking around for amateur actors or non-actors even

people just whom might meet on a tram or a bus on the street there's a belief that all children are natural actors which they're not i had great trouble with the boy in machali he was very shy and i had to use all my patience my persuasion i treat them as adults i i sort of take them into my confidence and whisper instructions to them and i find that after maybe the first day or the second day onwards they're very obedient and they do what i ask them to do [Music] he gives you entire liberty

to perform in the beginning only he interferes only when you make a mistake or he wants to guide you or correct you in some direction you just describe the particular scene or the emotion he wants to wants me to do and just stand by and see how i can do it so i also felt that i was contributing to the creation to to his creative efforts [Music] our lifestyle is a mixture now so if you use purely classical indian music in films which are for instance contemporary in theme and look urban contemporary it's wrong it

doesn't sound right so i have almost always combined western and indian styles except if it's a story about rural india which retains its age-old look there you would use indian folk instruments things like that this is a piece of music uh from my film charolata which has a scotch ballot as the basis of the tune this comes back several times in the film and i use western instruments mainly in combination with indian drums and this is a common device which i often use in this film since it had a very sophisticated westernized setting it needed

that [Music] um [Music] [Music] i have never written any music which can be clearly identified as either fork or classical or indian or western because the films have a look generally which are not wholly indian even if it's a modern story laid in calcutta there are all sorts of things which have very western connotations it's so western that you have to devise a kind of a combination things which can't be either holy india or wholly western so it's it's music in my very early films i worked with other composers like ravishankar but they were not

film composers really they were virtuosos and when i would tell them that i want a music which lasts 17 seconds they would throw up their hand and say no we will play for three minutes you choose what you like so all the work was done in the editing room and sometimes i would find that i didn't have the right kind of music for a certain episode the composer hadn't provided the music in any case they don't like to be dictated too much and they were all good friends on a personal level so i didn't want

to jeopardize the friendship so i finally decided since i couldn't find another composer to do the kind of thing that i wanted i decided to teach myself i'm used to a tremendous lot of freedom right from my first film and that's the main thing that worries me whether i'll be able to get the freedom that i want to the extent that i have it here now everything is decided beforehand with a color film all the color schemes every piece of costume i go out myself to buy the material these are drawings of costumes which uh

the various characters in this film charulata wore and film and i have indicated the particular sets and the sequences in which they were used i design posters for my firms do some of the advertising campaign occasionally designed the leaflets and have also designed the credits and when i started making films i almost inevitably wrote my script in the visual form as you find here you see these are scenes it's a shooting script actually but they're not typed they're in little joints with notes about the dialogue on the side and there are also architectural things and

uh in discussions with our directors i find that this form helps in my discussion with the cameraman as well as it helps me because i always have a kind of a visual reference of the scene i'm going to shoot in the early distances in the time of the trilogy i was doing the screenplay i was uh directing of course i didn't operate the camera at that time and i didn't write the music at the time of editing also i was there very much there but later on for instance i took over operating i operate my

own camera now i've been doing so for the last 15 years not that i have no trust in my cameraman's operational abilities but i feel that ever since we've been using an aeriflex that is the best position to judge the the acting from is through the lens and also i noticed that working with non-professionals they are happier if they don't see my face while i'm directing i'm not sort of staring at them like that you know so they're happier they feel more relaxed i can call my films my own without any qualms i mean whatever

is good or whatever is bad in my films is due to me i mean praise or blame it i feel much happier that way this year the academy board of governors has voted to award an honorary oscar to the great indian filmmaker satyajit rai when it's an extraordinary experience for me to be here tonight to receive this magnificent award certainly the best achievement of my movie-making career thank you very very much there has been an element of risk in almost everything i have done because i was trying out something new something which the audience had

not seen before filmmaking has never been easy to get a film done one stops thinking of whether there's a school a filmmaker whether you're creating a school whether others falling into footsteps you just keep on working because after all it's also a living you make a living and you express yourself at the same time crossing many obstacles on the way i make the kind of films that i want to make that's all i can do [Music] [Applause] you