K Balachander broke the shackles of studio sets: Gautham Menon

Gautham Menon, director of films like Vaaranam Aayiram and Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa, talks about the influence of one of Tamil cinema’s greats, K Balachander.

Ever since I watched his film Punnagai Mannan in 1986, K Balachander has been my role model. That was the first Balachander film I ever watched. Songs of this Kamal Hassan-starrer were quite a rage those days. I went home and announced to my mother that I loved the movie and the music. She told me then that Balachander was the greatest filmmaker in Tamil and recommended his other works. I collected VHS copies of all his movies, as DVDs were alien to us those days.

My love for films centres on how they are made. It is the way shots and scenes are conceived and composed that draws me to movies. I’ve always had this desire to understand how things are conceptualised. Maybe it was my passion for reading that inculcated this curiosity in me: I’d wonder how authors like Enid Blyton and Oscar Wilde churned out such interesting works. It was no different with cinema. I was drawn to nuances of filmmaking even as a child. Perhaps I was attracted to the mental image of a filmmaker roaming around town with his ‘automatic camera’.

My parents used to take me and my sister out to watch films at least four times every week. This way, I got to watch films by greats like Mani Rathnam, Bharati Raja, Balu Mahendra etc, and I figured out early on what each one’s distinct style was.

Watching Balachander’s films took me to an entirely different world. Each of his works — Apoorva Raagangal, Aval Oru Thodar Kathai, Avargal, Varumayin Niram Sigappu, Thaneer Thaneer — was different from each other. And yet the main characters were always familiar, someone I could identify with in some way or other.

Then came his Maro Charithra — which he later remade into Ek Duuje Ke Liye (EDKL) in Hindi. It was an unbelievable and unprecedented experience. A middle-aged director experimenting with a love story and a different dénouement raised quite a few brows. But EDKL, shot in 1981, was a trendsetter among Hindi films.

It was because of Balachander that a new breed of directors could make it big in Tamil cinema. He liberated Tamil films from the shackles of studios and sets. It was thanks to him that, for the first time, movie watchers got a feel of what rural Tamil Nadu was like.
Balachander’s dialogues and shot division were on par with the best directors of the world. At a time when technology was still a prerogative of Hollywood movies, he could realise aesthetically-carved shots through sheer imagination and intelligence. His film language was unique and different and this made other directors want to explore new avenues while portraying scenes.

Though I have not attended any filmmaking course, the films by Balachander, Rajeev Menon and Mani Rathnam were my primary source of knowledge. When I watch movies, I imagine myself in the filmmaker’s shoes, planning each shot and how I would handle it. I’ve also avidly followed movies by Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Basu Bhattacharya and Gulzar.

Three decades after EDKL made waves, I too am coming out with the Hindi version of one of my Tamil movies. While in EDKL a Tamil boy falls in love with a north-Indian girl, my film is about the romance of a north-Indian boy and a south-Indian girl. But the similarity ends there. I’ve never been overly influenced by any one director. I want all my movies to be different in style and substance.

— Gautham Menon spoke to Kumar Chellappan