A Quote by Mani Ratnam

Let me be very frank. I make films keeping within the mainstream and my cinema is popular cinema. I love it this way. — © Mani Ratnam
Let me be very frank. I make films keeping within the mainstream and my cinema is popular cinema. I love it this way.
I am extremely proud that our cinema is being recognised in the West. I want Indian cinema to get its dignity, not by giving them the kind of films they expect from us, but by making cinema in a way that carries the legacy of the mainstream masters forward.
I haven't got the kind of films from mainstream cinema which I would have wanted. But then mainstream cinema has a different bunch of people who are happy working with each other, which is fine.
We have always wanted to give back to cinema, and we couldn't possibly think of a better way to do that than facilitate films which we believe will make Malayalam cinema proud.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.
Within the mainstream cinema, I feel you can experiment and make sensible films. It's possible to tell a story with characters and emotions which are real, genuine, and which need not be over the top.
Well, I think by and large, certainly in terms of cinema, American culture dominates our cinema, mainly in the films that are shown in the multiplexes but also in the way that it has a magnetic effect on British films.
I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.
A message I've been telling myself: the cinema is very conservative, and unless you have a story that satisfies you, that is within the unchallenging zone, but you love it, you can't do it as cinema. Otherwise, you better go do it for television, which is more daring now.
I don't even watch many huge films. I don't go to the cinema every weekend. I watch selective cinema and want to make my kind of films.
I know why I make films -cinema is a mode of expression that allows you to express all the nuances of a thing while including its opposites. These are things that can't be quantified mentally; yet they can exist and be juxtaposed. That may seem very contradictory. Cinema allows you to film these contradictions.
I think what I loved in cinema - and what I mean by cinema is not just films, but proper, classical cinema - are the extraordinary moments that can occur on screen. At the same time, I do feel that cinema and theater feed each other. I feel like you can do close-up on stage and you can do something very bold and highly characterized - and, dare I say, theatrical - on camera. I think the cameras and the viewpoints shift depending on the intensity and integrity of your intention and focus on that.
My production company wasn't doing well, so we were not producing films. Over a period of time, we have realized that we are going to produce our own films and make cinema that we like. We've got so much in-house talent, and my kids are going to be coming, so we all decided that we are going to be in films and cinema.
I believe in cinema! Unfortunately, 90 per cent of Hindi cinema is non-cinema. Only marketing works here. Even the item songs in these films are an extension of marketing.
The third line of cinema today is neither art nor commercial but categorized as good and bad cinema. I think two films - 'Main, Meri patni aur Who' and 'Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon' were the base films for this new line of cinema.
I was this classic film school snob who thought mainstream cinema was synonymous with bad cinema.
American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.
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