The much talked about 31-star studded title track Deewangi was one of the most difficult scenes to shoot. What started out as a six-heroine starrer ended up as a mega dance sequence. ” Once word got around that Farah was shooting an item number with so and so, everyone got interested and wanted to jump onto the bandwagon. We had celebrities coming at all odd hours for the shoot. Preity Zinta turned up at around midnight once. We sometimes had to shoot with only two stars on the set,” he says.
Having had the distinction of turning even slightly angular beauties like Shilpa Shetty and Sushmita Sen into drop-dead, gorgeous sirens on screen, he says that there is no such thing as having a naturally photogenic face. “Of course, I have heard that people like Shobana don’t need make-up to look beautiful. But all the girls I have worked with have had to have make-up, special lighting and tuck-ins for me to do justice to their beautiful selves,” says Manikandan.
Though a veteran in the field, he says even he felt thrilled when Dharmendra, Jitendra came to the sets. He says it was a little tricky making the stars of by-gone years look as glamorous as their younger counterparts. “We had to make Subhash Ghai wear a high-neck shirt and loads of make-up to cover his double chin.”
“The film was colossal and grandiose in terms of everything – glamour, style, money, etc. And Farah wanted it that way,” he reminisces.In terms of editing, recapturing the 1970s retro look in the film was far from easy.
“While we could easily copy the styles and costumes of those days, when it came to lighting we had a problem. We had long discussions on whether it would be better to stick to the absurdities of the era or make compromises. In the end, I used soft lighting and all the best that technology had to offer as the harsh lighting of the 70s would not have matched the aesthetic sensibilities of today’s audience,” says Manikandan. We also had to remove huge 50-storyed skyscrapers from Mumbai’s landscape during editing to be more authentic, he adds.
A film institute student, who had to come up the hard way, it took four backbreaking years in the Tamil film industry before he got his break as a cameraman in Atharmam. “It was a low-budget film, in which every take counted. The luxury of doing a Shankar’s film, with great-looking sets and as many as takes as needed for that one perfect shot, came much later. But working for films like Atharmam was good training,” says Manikandan.
One of the few artists, who has made a successful transition from the Tamil film industry to the Hindi one, he feels that we have a lot to learn from North Indians in terms of professionalism and discipline on the sets. “Here, sometimes we have just one toilet for a 250-crew set, while in Mumbai, everyone had their own suite, complete with attached bathrooms on the sets.”
“Also Tamil films never get completed as per schedule. For instance in Anniyan, the shooting was erratic; things got delayed and I did not have any dates to complete the film in the end. So cinematographer Ravi Verma had to take over from where I left,” he says.
Describing himself as an ad filmmaker (he has about 500 ad films to his credit as on date) who makes brief forays into filmdom to make his presence felt, he feels that filmmaking is a taxing art unlike ad production. “Even now I had to turn down a Hollywood film, produced by Warner Bros, because I desperately needed a break after Om Shanti Om,” says Manikandan.
Manning cameras might be exciting, but sometimes it could get a little too exciting for safety, according to this ace cameraman. While shooting the fire sequence for Shah Rukh’s blockbuster, a cylinder had burst barely a few yards from where Manikandan was standing. While he escaped, two other technicians on the set were injured.
And while daredevil stunts like shooting from a copter, while being suspended on ropes, might sound exciting; it is the reverse in reality, he says. While shooting for the famous ” Oh Sukumari” song for Anniyan in Amsterdam, Manikandan had to spend nearly six hours being frozen to death while being suspended in mid-air from a copter. “Shanker wanted purple-coloured tulips for the song, so we had to shift from one location to another. And the whole time, there I was hanging dangerously in mid-air, cursing my fate and watching my assistant puke,” quips Manikandan.
He also has the honour of being the first cameraman to shoot time-slice frames in India after the technique gained fame with the release of Matrix. He managed to successfully bring about this extremely complicated shot, using as many as 120 cameras, surrounding the actors from 360 degrees, in the films Main Hoon Na and Boyz. “It all comes down to the timing. Movie making is just a series of still shots. And time-slicing makes maximum use of it by freezing one object of the scene and capturing the others in motion,” explains Manikandan.
For someone who has always come up with new innovations in technique and treatment with every new movie, he says that he does not have any distinctive cinematographic style. “I adopt styles, based on the script in hand. I try to make the camera movements in sync with the general theme of the movie,” he says.
Justifying the huge sums of money spent on just one song sequence in Indian cinema, he says that people no longer want to see lovers dancing around trees in botanical gardens. “They want to see new things every time. And with directors like Shankar or Mani Ratnam they have to prove themselves all over again with every new film.”
