“They say it’s a great success. I’d say it’s a good start.”
- Kamal Haasan at the end of the weeklong workshop
The curtains came down on the Chennai International Screenwriting Workshop at IIT-Madras on Wednesday evening with an ellipsis… a promise that the show will go on. More such workshops are planned in the near future in different cities in South India, Kamal Haasan, the brain behind the initiative, announced.
30 of the 250 students will get a chance to develop their ideas into screenplays for a ten-minute short film. Do watch this space for more.
The need of the hour is to adapt to the changing times and prepare for new media platforms.
“We have to be ready to deal with platforms which are palm-size… Like Youtube. The length of the film will change. Films will get shorter because attention spans are getting shorter,” he said.
“Why should every film have six songs? It’s not that I am against songs, I am against mono-culture. Just like how everyone is different, films too must be different,” Mr. Kamal Haasan said.
The weeklong workshop and seminar was a huge success, generating about 1600 applications (out of which only 250 were selected) and attracting speakers from all over the world.
Veteran writer Jean Claude Carriere, K. Balachander, Gollapudi Maruthi Rao, Balu Mahendra, French writer Olivier Lorelle, Anjum Rajabali, K.Hariharan, Shekhar Kapur, Rituparno Ghosh, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Atul Tiwari, Shyamaprasad, Sriram Raghavan, Bharat Bala, LA-based screenwriter David Scarpa and producer Michael Andreen were some of the speakers who participated in the discussions. Kamal Haasan himself attended every session during the week as he hinted at the beginning of the workshop.
“Given the surge of interest in screenwriting, we will see a mutative change in the quality of storytelling in Indian cinema,” Anjum Rajabali, acclaimed screenwriter and Head of the Screenwriting Departments at Film and TV Institute of India, Pune and Whistling Woods, Mumbai, said. “We are the greatest storytelling culture in the world. And we have neglected screenwriting in cinema far too long.”
K.Hariharan, Director of L.V. Prasad Film and TV Academy, said that filmmaking is no longer the domain of the elite and writers need to prepare for the challenges.
“The screen will disappear and collapse. The difference between the elite and the audience has already collapsed. Everybody here today has seen the frame through the viewfinder on a handycam,” he said. “The viewer has taken over the medium and wiki-cinema will be the future as cinema enters the public domain. It’s already happening with DVDs that gives the viewer a choice to jump directly to a scene of his choice,” Mr. Hariharan explained.
Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Bharat Bala and Olivier Lorelle were among the speakers who believed that to go global, screenwriters must go local. “We have to get talent from the small towns and let them tell their stories in the universal language. People are the same anywhere in the world,” said Mr. Mehra. “We have to look deep within ourselves and the story will automatically become universal,” added Mr. Lorelle, who wrote the Oscar-nominated ‘Indigenes’ that was screened for students.
Writer-director Sriram Raghavan and Director Rituparno Ghosh too answered questions on their films ‘Johnny Gaddar’ and ‘Dosar’ that were screened during the course of the workshop.
Shyamaprasad and Rituparno Ghosh discussed the challenges involved in adapting literary works into cinema. “Translation is like a woman. It is always beautiful or intelligent but seldom both,” Mr. Ghosh said to sum up the session.
Sriram Raghavan struck an optimistic note when he said: “Hindi cinema has started tackling offbeat subjects not just in independent but also in mainstream cinema. Fellini on his first visit to India said that if he lived here, he would make a film everyday. We just have to find the stories.”
“Discover your own mythology. When a society forgets its mythology, it becomes schizophrenic and searches for something which is not its own,” said Shekhar Kapur. (Update: He has then gone on to blog about this and you can find that post here.)
Shekhar Kapur made a case for following intuition talking at depth about the complexities of writing for Hollywood and writer David Scarpa (who wrote The Day The Earth Stood Still) answered a few questions from students.
K. Balachander, Balu Mahendra and Gollapudi Maruthi Rao delivered lectures on screenwriting with a few wise tips for the students. “Filmmakers are writers too. Writers write on paper, filmmakers write on film,” Mr. Maruthi Rao said.
Earlier, Jean Claude Carriere spoke for over an hour about incorporating mythology in films and took questions from students on his film ‘Cyrano De Bergerac’ that was screened during the workshop, and said that Shakespeare, Balzac and Moliere were the biggest influences of his life. “Shakespeare is a good friend. He sits with me when I write my stories. I consult him all the time,” said Mr. Carriere.
“No matter whether the screen stays or not, stories will stay and so will be the art of storytelling,” Atul Tiwari, screenwriter and playwright who moderated the final session summed up. “The media of storytelling may change but that will not take away the importance of a good storyteller. Because, even in the interactive format of video-gaming, the basic principles of storytelling do not change.”
Coming up: Photos and Videos from the Opening ceremony
