Mani Ratnam

“I liked Guru Dutt, the way he used songs and the way he shot songs. He was a class apart.”

“Bilingual films come with a certain inbuilt practical problem with respect to the setting of the story and the dialect.”

“A film is between you and the audience. The distributors are the only people in between us. It is a straight equation.”

“The idea of 'Roja' was with me for seven years before I made it.”

“Writing is nagging, fascinating, troublesome and exciting.”

“The thing is that when you make a film, it is such an intense experience. It's like being married.”

“Indian cinema will continue to grow, I am very sure.”

“Seeing any film after I have made it is difficult.”

“I used to wonder how anyone could treat a fellow human as God. I never understood why they would do this.”

“When you break new grounds and try to do something different, it's always a high. I remember the first time we did a whole song in slow motion with lipsync for 'Geetanjali.' It was not prevalent at that time. We just had a method and we tried to do that. We weren't sure whether it was going to work, but that is the kind of risk you take.”

“Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.”

“To catch a piece of life on camera and make it come alive, add layers to it and deliver a product that is wholesome is really exciting to me.”

“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.”

“The fact that technology has developed so much gives you the liberty to tell the stories, which were difficult to say earlier. It allows you to tell it more convincingly, more elaborately and more beautifully.”

“I'm not saying that every song has to be an all-time hit or the greatest ever music. That's not what you should set out to do. But you have to find out what will work best for a particular story or theme or backdrop, and discuss how not to make it a cliche or fall into such traps.”

“Kamal Haasan is a huge talent.”

“What is film-making about if not romance?”

“Most ideas remain inside you for a while. You tell somebody when there is a spark or a thought, and leave it at that. You come back later, write down a few lines. I makes note in my mind on whether it can be made into a film or not.”

“When I made my first film, I was arrogant and over-confident.”

“With each film, you are still trying to get the length and measure right. And failure is all about others' perception of you. When you have one success, they think you know it all. But if you fail, they think they know it all.”