RGV about Goddess of Beauty SRIDEVI
In Vijaywada when I was doing my engineering there were so many times when I used to stand in the line waiting to buy a ticket for the new Sridevi movie and I used to keep staring in awe at her on the hoardings in the theater compound.
Her beauty and her sex appeal were so strong that it took many many films and many many years for both us audience and the film industry to realise and recognise the actress in her which was first showcased according to me in the most effective way in ‘Mr. India’ by Shekhar Kapur. Even though many films even in the beginning of her career showed her acting talent right from her debut film, her super stardom kind of brought out only her sex symbol image which was so strong that it blinded everybody to the tremendous talent in her.
Mr. India made the audience discover a new Sridevi primarily because of the way how Shekar Kapur’s aesthetics captured both her extraordinary beauty and her incredible performance.
My journey to Sridevi started when I was preparing for my debut film ‘Shiva’. I used to walk from Nagarjuna’s office in Chennai to a neighbouring street where Sridevi used to live and I used to just stand and watch Sridevi’s house from outside her gate. I just couldn’t believe that the goddess of beauty lives in that stupid looking house. I say stupid because I believed that no man made house deserved to house that beauty called SRIDEVI. I used to so desperately hope to catch a glimpse of her as she went in or out of her house. But sadly to my utter disappointment no such thing ever happened.
And then after ‘Shiva’ released and became a big hit producer Gopal Reddy came to me and asked if I was interested in doing a film with Sridevi. I said “Are you mad or what? I will die to just see her, let alone make a film with her!” Gopal Reddy arranged a meeting with her and took me to meet her at that very same house where I used to stand outside the gate and stare. At around 7.30 in the night we went and as luck would have it there was a power cut in her house. so I was sitting in her living room in candle light along with Gopal Reddy waiting for the angel to appear and my heart was thumping like mad. Her mother told us she was busy packing as she was about to catch a flight to go to Mumbai.
As we were waiting, every once in a while Sridevi was rapidly crossing the living room as she was moving from one room to another room in a rush to finish her packing even as she apologetically smiled at me for the delay. Everytime she was appearing and disappearing in a flash the director in me started slow motioning her and running her backward and forward for my visual pleasure.
Finally she came and sat in the living room, just said a mandatory few lines that she would very much like to work with me, which I am sure she would have said to a host of other directors and then she left for Mumbai. I continued talking to her mother with enormous respect and awe because she actually gave birth to Sridevi.
I went back to my place feeling like I was in the seventh heaven. The way Sridevi sat in front of me in the candle light got imprinted in my mind like an exquisite painting and with her image completely filling both my mind and my heart I started writing Kshana Kshanam.
I wrote Kshana Kshanam with the one and only purpose so as to impress Sridevi. Kshana Kshanam was intended by me as a love letter to her.
Throughout the making of Kshana Kshanam I just couldn’t take my eyes off her charm, her beauty her personality and her demeanor was a new discovery for me. She had an invisible wall around her and she does not let anyone cross that. Behind that wall she maintains her dignity and her self-respect and she never lets anyone inside. Also during the course of working with her and observing her technique of acting I began to understand more and more as a director about the nuances of performances and characterizations and for me she formed the epitome of cinematic acting which I believe is many times more complex and many times more effective than theatre acting.
When I was shooting “Andanantha Ettha Tara Theeram” song in Kshana Kshanam. After a certain shot in which Venkatesh and Sridevi were dancing I said “fantastic” and the dance master asked for one more take. After the shot was done, once again I said “fantastic” and the dance master again asked for one more…
I asked my assistant why he is asking for one more and he said “Sir, you are looking at Sridevi and he is looking at Venkatesh”.
Well, if she was in the frame no matter who else was there and what else was happening I and millions of others used to only look at her.
Her popularity and stardom had to be seen to be believed. We were shooting for the climax in Nandyal for Kshana Kshanam and the whole town came to a standstill when they came to know that Sridevi was in town. Banks, Govt offices, Schools, Colleges everything in town stopped functioning as everyone wanted to see Sridevi.
She stayed in a traveller’s bungalow in Nandyal and at a little distance me and Venkatesh were staying in another bungalow. There used to be a crowd of atleast 10,000 around her bungalow throughout the night just staring at it. There were about 50 tough local guys along with a 100 strong police force who used to continuously guard her.
When we were at location we used to know that Sridevi started from her bungalow to come to location because we used to see a column of dust that was travelling towards us from the distance. The dust was due to the thousands of people running behind her car.
Well anyway to cut short, a very long heart touching story of my feelings towards Sridevi I finished Kshana Kshanam and then went on to make Govinda, Govinda with her and in due course I have seen her going through a lot of personal tragedies like her father’s death and her mother’s mental illness.
The woman who the men of the entire nation desired was suddenly left all alone in the world till Boney Kapoor stepped in to fill the vaccum.
So straight from her super stardom and magazine covers and her dazzling beauty on the silver screen, I saw her in Boney’s house serving tea like an ordinary housewife. I hated Boney Kapoor for bringing that angel from heaven down to being just an ordinary housewife.
I don’t go to Boney’s house these days because I can’t bear to see Sridevi in a realistic house, in a realistic atmosphere and with realistic people around. For me she is like a highly precious diamond which should be seen only in beautiful settings or in exotic locations and only in the surroundings of cinematic brilliance.
Sridevi is the most beautiful and the most sexiest woman God ever created and I think he creates such exquisite pieces of art like her only once in a million years.
So what if Boney has the real Sri in his house…? …. I have her captured as a cinematic goddess in the temple of my mind camera and as a divine angel in the heart of my celluloid dreams.
I thank god for creating Sridevi and I thank Louis Lumiere for creating the movie camera to capture her beauty forever.
Emotional Violence
When I put a line at the end of ‘Satya’ “My tears for Satya are as much as for those whom he killed”. I said that because I truly felt that emotion which came from my understanding of his emotion.
Anyone who takes up violence would not do it on a conscious decision (unless he is a psycho path) of wanting to live by it. All People who use it as a tool of power or who sadistically enjoy its effects would be far lesser in numbers compared to people who would have been compelled to embrace it by the sheer necessity of a situation they find themselves in or they are put in by powers which are completely outside their control.
This is what I have realized in the course of making ‘Rakht Charitra’. Every single one of the emotions of the characters of RC will be coming from a very familiar space to each and every member of the audience meaning that they would have felt a similar emotion some time or the other in their life time, so as long as the emotion exists dormantly in each and every one of us all it will take is just a certain extreme situation to trigger it off which will then just spiral out of control. Even the man who instigated it won’t be in control many a time.
I believe that the success of any true great conflict in cinema is only when any member from the audience cannot take sides with any one particular character which effectively means that their understanding is complete of where each of the conflicts are arising from and the audience just get caught in a limbo of what to say to whom.
For instance in ‘Satya’, one consciously cannot think that either Satya or Bhiku or Bhau or Gurunarayan or for that matter any other character is wrong. That’s because every one of them had a certain compulsion to think, act, and feel in a certain way. Similarly in ‘Company’, you understand the conflict between Malik and Chandu but you can’t really empathize with one more than the other.
Coming to ‘Rakht Charitra’, the primary difference between ‘Satya’, ‘Company’, and RC is that the characters of RC are many folds more emotionally volatile and that’s because the situations they are placed in are many more folds more volatile than in the other two films, which would naturally result in an eruption of highly violent emotions.
The Biggest Flop of my Life
Just felt like sharing this one personal experience of mine. It has nothing to do with films. So those of you who are not interested can get off right now.
Sometime in 1994 I just returned from Chennai to Hyderabad in the morning and was supposed to catch a flight to Mumbai in the evening. I was taking a nap in the afternoon when my sister suddenly woke me up and told me my distant cousin Bujji from Bhimavaram was on the phone. (Those days there were no cell phones yet.). I wondered why she woke me up for that and she said Bujji says it’s very urgent. Curious as Bujji was not even that close to me, I went to the phone and Bujji said that Dad had a heart attack and died, and before I could say anything he asked me if I was alone. When I said ‘no’ as my mom and sister were there near me, he asked me to come outside and call him from another phone. I started walking towards a STD booth at the end of the road with my brother-in-law following me. I was wondering why Bujji is being so secretive about his dad having a heart attack and dying. As I was nearing the booth it slowly started dawning upon me that he was talking about my dad. I turned around and asked my brother-in-law where my dad was and he said he went to Bhimavaram the previous day.
My fear being confirmed I called up Bujji and he told me the same and asked me whether we would be coming there or should he bring the body. I told him to bring the body. I turned around and told my brother-in-law about what happened and he just sat down on the road in shock. I personally was not feeling anything as I was seriously thinking about how to break the news to my mother. I quickly made a few calls to some relatives and told them that they will get to hear it from somewhere sooner or later and asked them not to come to my house till I prepare my mother.
Then in the walk back I thought of a story to tell my mother. I told her that Dad suffered some pain in the chest and I asked them to bring him to Hyderabad as there are better medical facilities here. When she got panicky I told her cheerfully that he is perfectly fine. My whole intention was to reduce the time of her crying before the body reaches and also for me to have time to plan how to make her slowly absorb the final shock. I literally went about doing a screenplay of sorts, sent some guys to the end of the road to stop any over enthusiastic relatives coming to console her and I made a friend of mine do mock phone conversations in front of my mother as if he is talking to people who are bringing my father and to say that the pain is increasing. That was my way of attempting to bring my mother slowly closer to the ultimate truth.
Finally this whole exercise happened till 11in the night and I went off to sleep. So far I have not felt anything at all as I was too busy doing scenes around to cushion my mother. At around 2.am my cousin woke me up and said the body is here. I came out and saw the car on the road in which they brought the body, and that’s when the reality first hit me. I told my cousin to take the car to his house and only bring it in the morning so that we can quickly do the funeral arrangements in the morning and spare my mother from the trauma of sitting with the body till the morning. Morning around 5.am my grandfather broke the news to my mother and by that time seeing all the activity building around I am sure she suspected it.
My uncle came and told me that my father has written a will that he wants to donate his eyes and body. My relatives told me to ignore that will and just do the rites as per traditions. I said I want to do as per my father’s wishes, and I went in and told my mother if she will have any objection to me going as per dad’s wishes. She asked me to do whatever I thought was right even as she was crying. I called the eye institute guys and two young nurses landed up in rickshaw. I still remember them laughing, as they got out of the rickshaw, at some private joke between each other. Their cheerful laughter contrasted so macaberly against the crying sounds and the somber look of the entire atmosphere. They sent everyone out, did whatever technical procedure to take the eyes and after they left my people told me it’s time to take the body to the hospital, I went in to see my mother next to the body of my father and there was a redness around his eyes and a slit which was angled because of whatever the girls from the institute did to take out the eyes.
I felt a tremendous guilt and anger against myself that I subjected my mother to see a man who she lived with for 40 years that way for the last time especially since she always used to talk about how much she loved my father’s eyes. That decision I have taken just in the name of fulfilling my father’s wishes, but I failed to foresee what the practical application of that procedure will subject my mother too. This I think is the biggest flop I made in my life.
Next day I told my mother let’s not do any 7th day or 11th day kind of rituals as we should remember him from happy times and not make an exhibition seeking sympathy. I gave her a long lecture of how she should look at everything positively. The next day I heard my mother crying in her room and I got upset that my lecture didn’t work. In the afternoon I heard a strange sound and when I went upstairs, I saw that it is my brother crying and that’s the first time I ever heard him cry and was thinking to myself that this is how it sounds when he cries. Throughout this entire process I did not feel for one second any grief myself and that was nothing to do with me and my father’s relationship. I loved him and respected him immensely. It’s just that I was in a state of film, for want of a better term.
I went to Mumbai after a few days to meet Naseeruddin Shah as I was casting him in a certain film. As soon as he saw me he got up and said he was very sorry to hear about my mother. Somebody gave him wrong info that it is my mother, so as not to embarrass him I didn’t tell him. Then he went on to talk about his mother and asking questions on how my father was taking it. The fact that I didn’t stop him in the beginning itself it became even more difficult now to tell him that he got it wrong. So I went through the entire comedy.
Years later somewhere in 2003 or so, I was in Pune in Nana Patekar’s house. Me, Nana, Shimit Amin and Sandeep the writer of “Ab Tak Chappan” were doing a script session. In the context of a scene for a reference I started narrating my father’s episode and when I came to the part of the nurses from the eye institute and its aftermath, I suddenly got choked and broke down. Nana had to hold me in his arms to control me. It took me 9 years to cry and that too for more than my father, it was for that biggest flop I made.
“Rifle”
That was what we used to call her. Rifle was a name someone gave her at College and it stuck. She was the most sexiest woman I have ever seen in my life. When I was studying in Siddhartha Engineering College Vijayawada, there used to be lot of construction activity going on there and she was one of the construction labourers. Me and many of my classmates used to watch her through our classroom window while a boring soil mechanics lecture droned on. It didn’t make a difference to us that her thighs were caked with cement dust and her hair was uncombed, she used to walk bare feet with her chest thrust out and used to look straight in our eye. She had more sex in her little finger than most women in their whole bodies. To us she was just sex personified. Our imagination of how she would look naked under her clothes drove us insane. Agreed that our ages were such that even a telephone pole wrapped in a saree would look sexual, but there really was something truly amazingly electrifyingly sexual about Rifle. It’s not that there were no other women on the campus. There were plenty both in the engineering and the medical college but Rifle was Rifle.
I always felt there is a fundamental difference between beauty and sexuality. Beauty pleases your senses whereas sexuality controls your senses, or even more correctly makes your senses go berserk. Your rational thinking gets lost and the animal instinct takes over. Rifle used to draw out the animal in all of us. She in her non-caring demeanour and in the way she used to clothe and behave epitomized the word ‘sex’. We all used to sit in the nights with textbooks on our laps and have endless discussions on the shapes and sizes of Rifles various attributes. It took us the tremendous strength of our combined will of all our upbringing, education, social programming, morality, religious strictures and fear of law which just about managed to control us from pouncing upon her.
If ever in my life I respected God, it was for creating Rifle.
Now why was she so sexual compared to the crystal clean girls who used to come in swanky dresses, their lips red with lipstick? I think it’s because no man wants to taste lipstick when he kisses a girl.
I strongly feel that sexuality works more when it is ultra real rather than when it is enhanced by cosmetics. Aesthetics kind of undermine the rawness of sex. For example I think the difference between an erotic film and a porn film is the backlight. If it’s back-lit it’s erotic and if it’s front-lit it’s porn. In both cases the content is the same.
All said and done, for me Rifle was the ultimate epitome of what God really intended a woman to be like, before the cosmetic industry, the costume designers, the make-up people and the jewelry merchants came in and started backlighting that wonderful species called women.
P.S:
P.S:
- Incidentally Rifle never knew that she used to be referred as ‘RIFLE’.
- She was completely unaware of the volcanic emotions she aroused in the hearts and loins of a thousand guys on the Campus.
- She never knew how many floodgates of jealousy she opened when she married a guy who used to run a Paan-Shop opposite our college gate.
- Some day I will surely make a film based on the concept of “The woman as a sexual being” and I want to call it “RIFLE” as a tribute to her.
I was born in Siddhartha Engineering College
If a man is about what he is and not what he was then I would say my birth was at Siddhartha Engineering College in Vijayawada. This is because if I take into consideration the kind of a person I am today, I can trace back every thought, every idea, every experience and every influence I have ever had in my life back to something which happened on that campus.
The kind of people I met, I interacted and hobnobbed with on that campus had helped me in gaining an enormous insight into so many things including the various aspects of human minds. Right from my debut film “SHIVA” till my Mumbai-based so-called realistic films, I have many times designed the characters and also incidents in those films based upon something which happened there or someone I knew or interacted with on that campus.
I was awed with certain lecturers personalities notably among them Mr.N.Prabhakar Rao our Maths lecturer. I used to admire our then Principal T.Venugopal Rao who I consider to be one of the most dynamic personalities I have ever met in my life. I still remember an incident when he was addressing us students in the night time in the hostel compound when someone from the crowd shouted something very derogatory from the darkness. He shot back saying that he is not scared of people who go to Tamil Nadu and abuse people in Telugu and of people who will never dare to come into the light. There was absolute silence after that.
I was a bad student and I did not deserve to be a part of that campus as I failed twice in my course. But having said that, the campus did give me a tremendous dose of education in each and every aspect of my life in every conceivable way.
It taught me to respect, to fear, to understand, to empathize, to look up to great students and also to feel guilty about me not being one.
Now that I spend lakhs and crores it almost seems unimaginable to me how I could have survived there on the 400 rupees my father used to send me every month. Inspite of that I don’t ever remember me being unhappy about not having money. I guess that’s because of the spirit of the camaraderie I had around me, it seemed as if everybody’s money belonged to everybody.
Hoping that even a dog’s tail can be straightened there were countless times some lecturers tried to educate me on the ills of being a bad student and warned me that I will have no future. That’s because I hardly ever used to attend college and all the time I used to be in film theatres around the campus like Vijayalaxmi, Ramapriya, Ramkrishna, etc.
Fair enough that I have made it in life as a filmmaker and I think mainly it is due to me not attending college and attending theatres but this only could be an exception and not a rule. Since my first film “SHIVA” was a hit, I can now hold up my collar but what if it hadn’t been. It’s not as if I knew my first film was going to be a hit. If I knew what will be a hit why would I make flops too?
The biggest contribution that Siddhartha Engineering College did to me is that since I lived in a protective environment vis-à-vis my family from my birth onwards at my home in Hyderabad, by being suddenly plunged into that campus which was completely alien to me in terms of both the place and its people, I experienced a very different and real world and hence I had the opportunity to learn about everything once again from its beginning in its true nature.
When you are a child and everyone around you is taking care of you it is so easy to imagine that you are the centre of the world and that your father is the king and the city you are seeing through your window is your kingdom.
Only when you are thrown into an alien environment that you realize that you are just one of the many and there’s nothing really special about you and then from the experiences you gather there you can atleast make a sincere attempt to become special and this is where Siddhartha Engineering College helped me tremendously.
Lagadapati Rajgopal the Congress MP and me used to ride around in the campus on his bike and were involved in plenty of fights on the campus. I was not at all surprised when later on in life he became a big time politician as I could see the markings of a leader in him very clearly even back then.
The entire opening sequence of my first film “SHIVA” was an incident which happened right outside the college gate. I just used various aspects of the cinematic medium like cinematography, music etc to capture it correctly and enhance the effect.
The opening sequence of “Raat” (“Raatri” in Telugu) was conceived by me sitting in a tea stall in a place called Kamayya Thoppu which was just a stones throw away from the campus. In the film I actually put a board with the name “Kamayya Thoppu” to pay my respects to that place.
I had an opportunity to study the frustrations of economically backward people and the anger and jealousy which comes out of it towards the rich people from how us engineering college students used to look at the much more well-off medical college students who used to be in the same campus during those days. This study of mine I put to use in various forms in my films over a period of time.
I realized that a woman looks most desirable when she has the least make up from my observations of a construction labourer on the campus nicknamed “rifle” which eventually contributed to how I portrayed my heroines.
I met the most intelligent man I have ever come across in my life called “Satyendra” on that campus who initiated me into the various philosophies of the world.
I studied Goonda elements and power mongers in and around the campus and till today I keep using and have also used their character traits and their psychological aspects in quite a few characters of my films like “Satya”, “Company” etc.
Well, the whole point of this article is that inspite of me knowing that other people’s memories are always boring I still could not resist writing it as I was invited for an Alumni meet with my batch-mates on December 25th in the college. So in the excitement of me, Rajgopal and all our other friends going to be in that space after so many years I wrote this to share it with whoever is interested. As for the rest who are not interested, SORRY!
On 25th December if you feel like you can wish me Happy Birthday, as like I said I was truly born at Siddhartha Engineering College.
Assistant to an Assistant
I was so confidently clear about the opening shot of my first film “SHIVA” that the camera set on the crane should be showing the college in the suggestion of a college name-board, come down slowly and pan to the close-up of a car wheel coming into the foreground and stopping in front of the camera. Tired of my repeated narration of this shot of mine during the pre-production of SHIVA, my assistant Siva Nageshwar Rao advised me not to get fixed up about shots as it might not be always practically possible to do things on location the way one imagines while writing the script. He pointed out that it’s possible that the height of the crane might not match up to the height of the name-board of the college. Or if the board is too high we have to tilt the camera up and we will only see the sky in suggestion and not the college, and if it’s too low and you have to tilt down, either you will see the ground instead of the college or the travel downwards to the wheel in the foreground might not be enough.
That however simplistically it might sound, was technically the first lesson I learnt in terms of the complex practicalities of the shooting of a film on location. The difference between how much would you be compromising versus how stuck you are about what you imagined has a very thin line. In the case of the college name-board after Nageshwar Rao’s input I spoke to the art director Tarani to adjust the board height to the exact desired height.
Siva Nageshwar Rao was technically my assistant but I started off my career as being his assistant in the making of “Rao Gari Illu”, the director of which was Tarani. Nageshwar Rao never trusted me enough to give me a responsible job because I was the producer’s recommendation candidate. But in the course of filming he kind of warmed up to me as he might have felt that I am a little more than just the producer’s recommended candidate. So when I got the break for “SHIVA” I requested Nageshwar Rao to assist me.
So my assistants were Siva Nageshwar Rao, Krishna Vamsi, Teja and Uttej. Teja, I met him as a camera assistant of Maheedhar the cameraman of “Rao Gari Illu”. Both Krishna Vamsi and Uttej were kind of recommended by Nageshwar Rao.
From the time I was trying to get a break till I reached “Rao Gari Illu” I was able to impress the producers Venkat and Surendra so much that they were giving me, an assistant, more importance than the director himself which obviously was not taken too kindly by the rest of the assistants of that film let alone the director. They used to think that I am just conning the producers with my English and high funda talk which was partly true but what was also true is that my high funda talk had enough material in it to convince the producers to give me a break.
It was very rare during those days that you could be an assistant who can talk English and that used to intimidate them. What also used to intimidate them was my knowledge of English films and also filmmaking techniques which I picked up by voraciously reading “American Cinematographer” magazines which used to lie around in Annapurna Studio’s store room and read by nobody but me.
Coming back to Siva Nageshwar Rao, after all the confidence and my supposed knowledge with which I convinced the producers and Nagarjuna by the time we reached the production stage, on the first day of the shoot I didn’t know how to call for the shot. I just became blank with so many people on the set and so many things happening and Siva Nageshwar Rao from behind was whispering in my ear to call for “start, camera” and to say “sound” and then “action”. So my first day shoot went on by mostly being prompted by Siva Nageshwar Rao.
The cameraman Gopal Reddy after finishing lighting shouted “Order, Sir”, which I took as he wants order on the set and I also repeated after him by shouting “Order, Sir”. Across the set Siva Nageshwar Rao gave a dirty look at me, took me aside and said, “He is asking you to order him to take that shot and that’s why he is saying ‘Order, Sir’ and since you are the ‘Sir’ here, how can you yourself again shout ‘Order, Sir’”. Sheepishly nodding I followed Siva Nageshwar Rao’s instructions.
And this is what I call as being an assistant to an assistant to an assistant.
P.S: Later on I produced “Money” with Siva Nageshwar Rao as director.
