I was trying to tell a story, not make a multi-starrer: Rajiv Menon on Kandukondain Kandukondain

It is a film that is still cherished for its storytelling, memorable characters and mesmerising music. With Kandukondain Kandukondain turning 20 today, we spoke to its director, Rajiv Menon on how he made this touchstone for multi-starrers. Excerpts:

You had made a youthful romance with

Minsara Kanavu, so what made you choose this story — a family drama — as your next film?

I’m not a prolific filmmaker, but I try exploring something new each time. I saw Minsara Kanavu more as a musical. The characters in that film came from a dream-like space, and most of it was shot inside the studio or in places that did not look like real places. That’s why I called it Minsara Kanavu. This one was between two sisters and what happens in their family. There was already a template in the form of Sense And Sensibility

, written by Jane Austen, from which I took certain elements and Indianised them. Take the aspect of two sisters who had to move out of their homes… I moved it to the mid-point of my story, a sort-of before and after. It also delineated the setting — the first half is set in the village and the second half in the city, a trope that you find in films like Sakalakala Vallavan. I chose a typical Indian style of narration.

You have said that the film is also based on the lives of you and your brother. How did you decide that you wanted to tell that through the prism of a Jane Austen story?

The fact the lives of my brother and myself changed after our father died, leaving my mother to raise us, and the struggles that marked those 15 years… that resonated with me. Though my brother and I were living in the same house, we chose different trajectories in life. He is a civil servant, I’m a filmmaker. He writes poems while I’m a science geek. But I didn’t have a literary story of two brothers onto which I could transpose my life experiences. In Indian films, if we have a story of two brothers, they tend to be films like Deewar

, where one becomes a cop and the other becomes a criminal. And if it was about two sisters, they would be about the two girls falling in love with the same guy and the conflict that results. So, for me, this was a story of two sisters who were different as characters and there was already a literary reference. So, the question was how to adapt it and use elements from my life and put them in those characters’ lives.

Certain elements of me is in Manohar’s character. One of the scenes that is very close to me is the one where you see the character doing wedding photography. I’d precisely done that in my life. An uncle had lent me a still camera. It didn’t have any additional lenses, and since my mother was running the family by singing and also selling UNICEF cards on the road, I did not want to ask her. So, I used to shoot marriages with it to make money. I’d shot some eight to 10 marriages, and one day, this magazine, Celebrity, wanted me to cover a party. I was attending a phone call as no one was around, and seeing me speaking good English, the editor asked about me. I told her I was studying in the film institute. She said, ‘You are studying in film institute and you are shooting these party pictures? God help you.’ And she walked off. That was like a dagger that went through my heart. That night, people got drunk, and started ordering me to take their pictures. I felt humiliated and I wanted to run away from the place once I had finished. The magazine bought 60 of my pictures, and I bought two lenses. With that, I stopped shooting weddings. But I used that experience when writing that scene for Manohar.

I had a very close relationship with my father’s mother because she stayed in my room after he passed away. I used to spend time talking to her, and the relationship that you see between Tabu ’s character and her grandfather is based on that.

You had roped in write Sujatha to pen the dialogues. What did he bring to this project?

I used to say the dialogues on a tape recorder as and when I got a scene. I was not comfortable in Tamil then (I can write dialogues in Tamil now), so, Sujatha sir told me to record my ideas and send those to him and he’d write down the dialogues. He’d add his own touches to those ideas and come up with the lines. In the scene where these discuss what the grandfather is saying, I knew Srividya’s character had to show her agony as a caretaker and a daughter, but the lines that she says… that’s all Sujatha sir.

Even though you have a literary source, you still have to adapt it. And you will have doubts… Will this work out? What dialect should a character use, and how should they speak? Even though you have got permission to shoot in Karaikudi, you might not know if you are going to use Karaikudi Tamil or not. So, you make a decision to have one form of Tamil that sounds like that of landed gentry, which is refined, but not too Brahminical or too colloquial. And you have these diverse characters… an angry and bitter ex-military man, a poetry-loving woman, who is a dreamer, a realistic person who is deemed unlucky. And that is where a writer comes in. And comedy came very effortlessly to Sujatha sir. He enjoyed writing it. We’d jam together and come up with the lines, and it was a great experience. I really enjoyed working with him.

With Minsara Kanavu, the subject lent itself to visual flourishes. But this one is a family drama. How did you decide the visual treatment of the film?

I like a very natural style of lighting, more inspired by Apocalypse Now or Satyajit Ray’s films or Ashok Mehta’s films. I had gone to a fantastical world earlier and was coming to a more realistic world in this film. I wanted to explore the dynamics of the houses in the film. These characters are trapped in the house though they are proud of the place. So, the visuals show the architecture — it’s sometimes the roof, sometimes the floor or the courtyard. Much like in a western, where the landscape is important, architecture is very important in this film. The house is a central motif in the earlier part of the film. And when the action shifts to the city, the motifs change. The visual style was based on the elegant dignity of characters who are living in a plush place, which they are not the owners of and do not have money — classy, but not rich. That treatment exists even in the colours that I used for Aishwarya’s Meenakshi (blues and greens), the ones that I used for Tabu’s Sowmya (earthy and sombre).

Is the opening shot — a helicopter landing against the backdrop of a waterfall — a nod to Jurassic Park, or was there some other intention behind it?

I had written those portions thinking of the Vietnam War where the helicopter played a huge role. We wanted to shoot this scene with a military helicopter, but in those days, getting one was rare. On my trips to Kochi, I used to see a military helicopter. But it was painted not in military colours, but in a shade of white. One day, I asked about it and they said it was Tata Tea’s helicopter. They used it to fly their officials to estates in Munnar. So, this info was in my mind, and when I was to shoot this scene, I called those people up. They told me that it was an old military helicopter that the Tatas had bought and were maintaining. I asked them if they would lend it to shoot, and they agreed. They said I could but with paint that could be washed off, like watercolour. So, I got my art director to paint it like an army helicopter. The pilot was a retired officer who had flown in Siachen and was used to taking the copter through any narrow place. I had drawn a diagram for him on how I wanted him to drop down at the shooting spot. He took off from Kochi airport and he did exactly what I was going for. And he said that he’d do another run and asked me to get the artistes ready.

The shot was the opposite of what you expect in a film centred around two women. It was a high testosterone moment. I wanted to get done with this army portion right away. You see this helicopter, the military action and an explosion. But then, you don’t know what the hell it was all about as the film then cuts to the titles and then goes on to talk about this house, marriage, bad luck and you are left wondering how that scene is connected to all this. And then, in the song (Kannamoochi Yenada), you see this guy come, slip up and discover that he is amputated.

Also, introducing this army scene in the middle would have jerked the structure of the narrative. If I had used it as a flashback after the song, it would have disturbed the tone.

The casting of the film is still talked about. What made you rope in some of these actors, who aren’t Tamil, in a film that is rooted in nativity?

In the films I had done cinematography for, like Bombay, someone like Manisha Koirala had come in and done a brilliant job as a Tamil girl. I don’t know who else could have done Shaira Banu better than her. Earlier, north Indian actors weren’t keen to act in regional films. But once Roja

had gone national, everybody started looking at it differently. A different kind of sensibility had crept in. Since Mani Ratnam’s experiment had worked very well in Bombay, and the business had gotten bigger… You had a market for films in north India and everybody wanted to get these films down to do our films. Even for Minsara Kanavu, the producers had fixed Prabhudeva and wanted me to get Madhuri Dixit for the female lead. When that didn’t materialise, they wanted someone else from Bollywood. Also, artistes like Revathy had kind of become rare to find here. I didn’t have a clear cut idea about casting when I began this film. Tabu had already acted in films like Iruvar

and Priyadarshan’s film in Malayalam ( Kaalapani), and she could read Telugu because she had studied in Hyderabad. So, I knew she’d be comfortable doing this role. We actually tried Manju Warrier, who, at that time, was about to get married to Dileep, so she wasn’t taking a concrete decision on being part of this film. Then, I tried Soundarya, and she listened to their script. He brother said, ‘Second heroine-a?’ and wasn’t keen. Then, my wife suggested Ash. She had been part of Tamil films before this. She loved the story, and somehow, her mother adjusted her dates and she came on board. Casting Major Bala was also a problem. I had imagined someone like Parthiban, but there was some issue going on between him and the producer at that time. I tried Arjun, but he was doing films like Mudhalvan

, so there was no need for him to play one among five characters. I felt Mammooty would be great as this aggressive character and reached out to him. Mammukka was cool and he said OK. It was not a God-given cast. Many of them were in their ascent but hadn’t peaked at the time of starting the film. In the one year’s time it took to shoot the film, Ajith had become a big star. I was trying to tell a story, not make a multi-starrer; it became like that.

What was the mood like on the sets? You had all these actors, or at least three or four of them, in most of the scenes…

We shot the first-half sequences in Kaanaadukaathan and Karaikudi, and that was the only time we had all these actors together. And we had a small schedule in Chennai when shooting Kannamoochi Yenada, when everyone was present. In fact, we manage to shoot even the final marriage sequence during that schedule. But otherwise, we could never get everybody together. It took one year to make this film though it was only 15-16 reels. It was very difficult to get everybody together, but once they came together, it was great fun.

Though you had started the film by early 1999, the arc of Ajith’s character (an aspiring filmmaker) is somewhat similar to his character in Mugavaree (an aspiring film composer), which released a few months before your film. At the time of release, were you apprehensive about comparisons between the two?

Not really. I didn’t know that as our shoot was completed before that. In those days, there was this belief that cinema pathi padam edutha padam odathu. I feel that cinema is a field where whoever you are, you are a nobody until you make your film. There is a big difference between an assistant director and a filmmaker. It’s like in cricket… Only very few people get to qualify. So, that struggle is huge and you can tell many stories about that.

The film also had a great supporting cast. What made you cast Raghuvaran in such a minor role?

Raghuvaran and I studied in the film institute together, and I was an assistant on his first film, Ezhavathu Manithan. Hariharan sir (the film’s director) would come to lecture in our institute, so I had assisted him; plus, my classmate was acting in it. Raghuvaran’s career took off and he became a star after that. He was a very casual, down-to-earth person. He had become the top villain actor, but I think that a good actor will be able to do any role. And I like using them in roles which you don’t expect them to do. Modern romance is such that there has to be some tension on both sides, so I felt that since Raghuvaran was playing that role the audience might sort of fear that Sowmya might end up marrying him. On the other side, I had Pooja Batra playing an actress. It is unsaid that there are other men and women as well in the city, and while there is no suggestion of whether these characters will fall for them or not, the cast, in itself, creates the tension.

Manivanan, obviously, you should have cast to lighten the scenes…

Completely. In the original, you had these two people, do-gooders, who were always trying to get people married. This wedding facilitator is a recurring motif in Austen’s novels. I just took that one step further. I’d heard about this Patiala Maharaja who had gone and got two cats married and used that in a scene. Also, this character helped me root Major Bala in that setting, and establish that he also has a family.

What was the approach to the music? With Minsara Kanavu, you had come up with an album that won the National Award. What were the discussions like with AR Rahman ?

Rahman had got three National Awards by then, and you can’t plan for one. So, we didn’t look at the music in that sense. We had explored Broadway and western music in Minsara Kanavu, so we tried to explore music that was in a ‘more Indian, more folk’ kind of a zone. I knew that Rahman had the ability to do great folk music, and it was so beautiful. I’m a great fan of Rasathi

( Thiruda Thiruda), and I used to tell him how that sound was so unique. Each of the songs has a history. The first composition we did was the title song.

Had you finalised the title by then?

The title was something that came out of Kambaramayanam… Kanden kanden Seethaiyai kanden. That was the idea. Because, for me, it was about two women finding their life partners, we went for Kandukondain Kandukondain. I think it was during discussions with Sujatha sir or Vairamuthu sir that we came up with this idea.

Let’s continue with the songs and the stories behind them…

For the songs, we went for key words that hadn’t come before… For Kannamoochi Yenada, I wanted the kind of Tamil that we see in Papanasam Sivan compositions, like Naan Oru Vilayaatu Bommaiya. That’s how we got the line: En manam unakkoru vilayattu bommaiya. Vairamuthu came up with Kannamoochi Yenada. There is a lot of ‘ Ka’ in the songs — Konjum Mainakale, Kandukondain Kandukondain…

For Enna Solla Pogiraai, I had taken references from Pablo Neruda’s poems, like this one where a man tells ‘I love you’ to a woman not knowing that he’ll have to pass this exam day after day until the end of his life. That was the time when I had also seen Il Postino

, and seen how romantic his life was. This was before Google, so when you had to give a reference, you had to source a painting or a book. Though he is seen as a revolutionary poet, Neruda had also written several love poems, and I was very fascinated by some lines of his. I’d read these translations of poems to Vairamuthu and then he came up with the line: Illai illai solla oru ganam podhum/ Illai endra sollai thaanguvadhendral/ Innum innum enakkor jenmam vendum/ Enna solla pogiraai

. ‘ Enna solla pogirai’ was not just a man asking a question to his lady love, but also reflecting on the pain of his love. This hook line was very fascinating. I remember Rahman had come up with dummy lines that went Saajan Aao Re/ Saajan Aao Re/ Aao Re/ Aao Re as he had composed the song like a north Indian folk ballad. We had a solid struggle to get the lines Sandhana Thendralai. The song is remember more as Enna Solla Pogirai rather than with its pallavi.

What does the word Smaiyai mean?

(Laughs) Rahman always comes up with these words like Maiyya Maiyya or Chaiyya Chaiyya. The idea of the song was that of a guy who is directing, and singing about his woman and her eyes. He had already told Sowmya about her eyes in an earlier scene, with so vizhi (eye) had to be the hook. We had already used Suttrum Vizhi Sudardhaan for Aishwarya, so Rahman came up with this Smaiyai. He always comes up with these consonants like Hulla Gulla and Humma Humma while he composes. And that was the case here.

So, finally, if you were to revisit these characters now, what do you think they are doing, 20 years later?

(Laughs) I don’t know what to say to this. Manohar might have made quite a few successful films and become a famous director. Sowmya would have become a rich person with a software company. Meenakshi would have probably sung quite a few chartbusting songs, some of them for Rahman also. Captain Bala’s flower business would have also done really well, I think.