From fact to fiction

He’s won Emmy awards, directed a documentary for the Kennedy family and is known as one of the most well-known wildlife filmmakers. But Alphons Roy is not a satisfied man.
“Now, it’s films which excite me. I want to tell my own stories. I want to do it in a fictional way,” he says.
Roy, who counts filmmakers Rajiv Menon and Santhosh Sivan as close friends, has done the cinematography for UTV’s forthcoming film Aamir, starring Rajeev Khandelwal.
“Films are a totally different ballgame, but it is something I want to do after 20 years of documentary films. For Aamir I shot Mumbai, but in a stark way. We shot in crowds, with no sets and almost no extras. The city was our canvas and we wanted to capture it in all its starkness,” he says.
“I have two scripts in mind. My first film will be a bilingual. Unlike other filmmakers, I am not used to sets or extras. I use an old technique called camera veritae wherein the camera is hidden and the film is shot entirely in that way,” he says.
Filming a documentary right now in Mizoram he says, “I’m shooting a documentary for Nat Geo on a particular bamboo plant, which flowers once in 48 years. But this particular plant attracts rodents and rats so much that they flock to the village where the plant is. When they are not satisfied, they attack nearby crops. This leads to famine and devastation in the area,” he says.
  j_shilpa@dnaindia.net