A.R. Rahman: 'Indian movies can't be called Bollywood'
The first time A.R. Rahman experienced virtual reality, the so-called "Mozart of Madras" was less than impressed.
"What is this stuff? I don't want to have this!" he exclaimed to his friend, the entrepreneur Sankar Thiagasamudram. Throwing the system off his head, Rahman left it to gather dust in his Los Angeles studio.
Some three months later, the 50-year-old came across the discarded headset and decided to give it another crack. "The technology must have evolved," he says, "because I was pretty blown [away] and started, like a maniac, watching a lot of stuff."
Naturally, it didn't take long for the multiple Grammy, BAFTA and Oscar winner to start sketching an idea specialized for the format, eventually landing on a universal family story with an unprecedented smell element. The resulting short film, Le Musk, is Rahman's directorial debut and is set to be the premiere release by new, Toronto-based production company Ideal Entertainment.
While in town for Ideal's launch, Rahman spoke to q digital about the film, Hollywood's renewed love affair with musicals and why Bollywood is a misnomer.
On conceiving Le Musk:
"My wife is a perfume freak — she's got like 150 perfumes on her table — so we were discussing why can't we make a movie with perfumes and I had this story about a little girl who lost her parents and how she finds the truth about her parents and Musk is about that. It's in English."
On his directorial debut:
"I swore not to direct but something happened and I had to step in. We devised this whole story according to the technology, according to how it could work [in 360], and shot the whole thing twice — the first time with non-actors just to check camera positions."
On producing a new smell element:
"We wanted it done in January but because it's uncharted territory... it's very exciting, we have Grace Boyle, who's [Slumdog Millionaire director] Danny's daughter, who's heading the smell aspect of it. She's got a company called Feelies and she's helping us with the smell. She's working with some university lab and a perfumer to get the smell we need."
On using film to bridge cultures:
"A family is a family, they're brothers and sisters, mother and father, and that doesn't change. And the suffering doesn't change, the challenges of life don't change, so people relate to that. We loved Life is Beautiful back in India and we loved Crouching Tiger.... and we loved the Bruce Lee films and Hollywood films. It's that you can relate to a family, you can relate to a feeling, you can relate to music. All the music like "Lara's Theme" or "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Love Story," these are all themes like nursery rhymes back in India. And the reverse doesn't happen because I realize that we don't present the music in the way that it should be presented or distributed in the West.
"From my first film, I always had this aspiration to take Indian film music out of the box and in a strange way it happened with Slumdog Millionaire. And we want to make it happen not just because of an exchange, which is very beautiful, but because we want to share the good things with the other part of the world."
On La La Land and Hollywood claiming musicals went away:
"They never went away! The guy who directed [La La Land] is a musician and he understood how to present [his music] to the world. There's no disconnect between the director and the musician because it's one. It's exactly what we're trying to do! I was very very pleased [with the film]. I watched it in the Grove in L.A., I watched it and walked out and said, if this movie had come out seven years ago I wouldn't have started my company."
On the term Bollywood:
"Indian movies can't be called Bollywood because Bollywood represents only the Hindi film industry. In India we have the Tamil film industry, which is south Indian, the Kanala industry, Punjabi industry, Bengali industry.... Each state is like a country: it has its own tradition, it's own food, it's own language, and film industry."