B Jeyamohan, noted writer and screenwriter, said the current generation of artistic filmmakers no longer depend on literature to make films. They are making movies out of other movies. “They are watching films from film festivals and creating another film from them. So there is a very common level of themes. I can see the loss in their films,” Jeyamohan said.
Jeyamohan, whose ambitious adaptation of the Mahabharata into a series, Venmurasu, counts as one of the great works of Tamil literature, is equally famous for writing around 25 successful commercial films. On January 22, he delivered the Vijay Tendulkar Memorial Lecture as part of the Pune International Film Festival (PIFF) at PVR, The Pavillion.
It was as part of the conference, titled “From Novel to Screenplay,” that Jeyamohan spoke about the current disturbing trend in cinema. “It is rare to see a new theme in modern art films. Filmmakers are creating films with politically correct themes common in world films. They are creating a new version of the same five or six themes. As a writer, I get very bored watching such films. If you want to create something new, you have to turn to literature. There is a lot of good writing in Kannada, Marathi, Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil,” Jeyamohan said.
Jeyamohan’s lecture, like a good movie, kept the room in suspense. It started with dry humor. “I am skeptical about my English language skills, especially when speaking to Indians,” he said. He is a Tamil writer but his mother tongue is Malayalam. “I write in both languages, but actually my mind is made up of Tamil. So, while I speak in English, I translate from Tamil automatically. It is a difficult thing,” he said.
Between talkies, he talked about his parents’ suicide, his own experience traveling the country as a beggar. “I wandered around the country as a beggar for two years. I witnessed a murder and from that the novel Yelam Ulgam and the film Naan Kadaul were made,” he said.
Young filmmakers and a large number of students filled three-quarters of the seats, clinging to the words of the legend who had written for films for two decades. “I have written for big Tamil films and I am perhaps one of the highest paid scriptwriters in India. So I am happy about it,” he said.
For over an hour, he took the room on a deep dive into the great works of literature (commercial and literary) and the films made about them, for better or worse. He spoke about his long-time collaborator Mani Ratnam and how Kadal he wrote became an expensive film and “was a disaster”. “Mani Ratnam was the producer of the film. He lost almost Rs 20 crore. But today, after 15 years, many people, especially intellectuals, celebrate Kadal as a classic of Tamil cinema,” he said. This year he publishes the written version of that novel. The intense speech gave a glimpse into the making of Ponniyin Selvan, the box office hit made by Ratnam and adapted by Jeyamohan from a historical epic.
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The lecture ends with Jeyamohan giving a series of advice to screenwriters and screenwriters in the audience, including counterintuitive advice like never following the plot of a novel. “Because the plot of a novel is completely different, never use the dialogues of a novel in the movie, and you should not follow the philosophical speech of a novel in the movie.” “A movie is not a medium of discourse. While watching a movie, you don’t have time to discuss that movie,” he said.
talking to him indian express After the conference, Jeyamohan dismissed the threat of AI. “I am writing for big films. We are theorizing big graphic scenes and digitally modified scenes. When AI was introduced, we started using it. But we found that AI can give you a standard that people are already used to. You have to create something new, only then people will appreciate your film. So, we don’t use AI except for creating a storyboard,” he said.
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