“The truth is, I tried every trick out there not to do this. I don’t do auditions generally and didn’t want to — not even for Tenet. At my age, you begin to ask what you are going to get now, doing a Hollywood film.”
Category: Conversations
Tenets of a standup comedian
“Back when I burst onto the scene, only the privileged and those who had the luxury of familial support, could give a shot at being a standup comic, but that’s not the case anymore.”
‘I like that we have made good Telugu content from Chennai’
…says writer-director Siva Ananth, as he joins directors Sarjun and Barath Neelakantan and actor Prasanna for a chat about their recent Aha anthology, Addham Aha’s new anthology, Addham, is made up of three short films, Crossroads (directed by Barath Neelakantan), The Unwhisperable Secret (Siva Ananth), and The Road That Never Ends (Sarjun). All the stories speak of flawed judgments and centre on moral conundrums….
Mohan Raja: Mithran was stronger, craftier, wilier than Siddharth Abhimanyu in Thani Oruvan
“Heroism in our cinema is usually of two types: Active, where the hero questions something wrong that happens around him, and Reactive, where he reacts to a wrong done to him. I don’t know if it has been done in Indian cinema before, but we came up with the idea of a ‘Proactive’ hero in Thani Oruvan.”
The Madras they don’t tell you about
“When this city was created, it was a land of opportunity for those desperate to escape oppression and seek a new life,” he says. “Who do you think created all these landmarks: Central station, Binny Mills, the post offices… everything that we today value as heritage? But have we truly repaid them for these sacrifices, or have we simply relegated them to a corner we barely pay heed to?”
Sudhir Srinivasan 