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Good stories like good cuisine need the right balance of ingredients to make them worthwhile. A good story features characters that captivates its reader's emotions and gets him involved. It features obstacles that create the conflict essential to the drama in the story, alongside the hook that gives it the right meaning. It then takes dedicated screenwriting effort to transform a good story into a good film script. But, it needs an equally dedicated director to bring the story to audiences on the silver screen.
It is not often that one comes across individuals who go the whole journey, penning the story, writing its screenplay and then directing the film. Satish Kasetty, who won a national award for his debut movie, Hope, has done it again, and this time, he’s out with his new movie, Kalavaramaye Madilo.
Speaking about his first film, he spent nearly 18 months researching issues being faced by children within the Indian education system. He then wrote the story and script of his award winning debut project, Hope. The film featured prominent film producer Dr.Ramanaidu for the first time in the role of an actor, while its music was provided by none other than the music maestro Ilayaraja. As reward to his dedication, his film brought the Telugu film industry, a National Award, ending an 18 year drought.
This time around, after 16 months of work on the subject, story and screenplay, Satish brings to us Kalavaramaye Madilo. For this film, prior to writing the story, Satish enlisted a music teacher to train him in the basics of carnatic music. He believed it was important to do so, for him to be able to make a film that speaks about music, passion and life.
Over the coming weeks, Satish will be writing about his new project, and sharing his experiences on making of the film, Kalavaramaye Madilo. |
Part 1 - 'Story to Movie journey' of Kalavaramaye Madilo
Two years ago this subject was born in my drawing room, Tammareddy Bharadwaja garu and I were sitting and discussing about the movie “million dollar baby”… how brilliantly the director portrayed the relationship between the coach and the pupil, and how wonderfully he managed to depict the aspiration and ambition of the protagonist and what lengths she was willing to go to achieve the goal. Clint Eastwood is a director par excellence; I am a great fan of him since my childhood. With “Million Dollar baby” the first seed for Kalavara maye…. was sowed….
One day my dear friend Ribu introduced me to a star singer show on Asia net channel. Though I did not understand a word of Malayalam, I used to watch the programme every day. It is an amazing show because every one hour episode used to exhibit only two songs. The way the rendered song was dissected and the various nuances and subtle elements of music that the judges discussed with the participants, was phenomenal. As a Lay person with a musical ear, I was amazed on realising such subtle variations to music. I gathered that there is a great difference between the listening ear of a layman who enjoys music and the listening ear of an expert who understands music. What looked like a good song when the singer rendered it , became a song with mistakes when the judge spoke about it. Wow. That was something… on of the judge in the show is Mr. Sarreth ( kalavaramaye Madilo music director) Another seed was sowed …
Watching all the reality shows on singing these days on Television, I kept wondering, what happens to all those winners being announced every year? What happens to them? Where are they? Where are they headed? How are they coping? Why don’t we hear about them? Why are they not coming up? Why are these kids not establishing themselves? Too many unanswered questions…One more seed was sown…
These mutually exclusive incidents pushed me to research about music.. Because, I decided, that was the subject for my next film.
I asked a few friends who knew about music to help me, some refused, and some laughed at me. All of them had one thing to say, go to a music director and get the tunes, tie that to a story and make the film. What they couldn’t fathom was that I wanted to know more about music. I always had a good ear; I could always differentiate between good and bad. What i needed was knowledge... to know more... and for that I needed more questions to be asked and more answers to be sought. I knocked more than a few doors in my endeavour, but no avail. Finally I decided to take another route. I checked my bank account balance and gathered that there was just about enough money to purchase a keyboard. The next day I purchased one and managed to hire a teacher to teach me the basics of Carnatic music.
My journey as a student of music began that day. So there I was, learning and seeking questions and answers on one side and on the other side I was conceiving my characters, my story...
I wanted to make a heroine centric film right from the beginning..So my central character was a girl. I was putting all the years of my experience as an observer of people and their different behaviours, attitudes, tastes, likes , dislikes, ambitions, fears, joys, achievements, failures, into the characters that I was creating. In the meantime my music teacher was spending extra hours with me and was helping me with the answers to all the questions that were cropping up in my head .He knew I was writing a script with music as the creative fulcrum. Therefore he was extra nice and accommodating with me and helped me a lot….
Six months passed I had the first draft of the script in front of me… and I was playing few songs on the key board… I was playing geethams too…. Seeing the first draft, I knew the road ahead was tough… yet I kept moving and started working on my second draft. Slowly my music classes were taking a back seat as I was getting more involved with my project. I could sense my characters taking shape and appearing live in front of me, slowly I started living my characters… I was in a different world.. I was enjoying it..It is an ecstatic feeling.. a creative high. That was the greatest joy I discovered as a story teller.
The flip side was that I couldn’t give the deserved time to the music classes…Gradually, I reduced spending time on the key board.. The story had me consumed totally... the characters, the script, was taking away all my time. It was time to choose between music and the script... I had to stop the music classes and I did.
I loved those music classes… I will go back to them sometime soon….
After 16months and 14 drafts I was ready with the final script. It was around this time I found the producer ready to back the project. That’s when KVM was ready to move out of my head and heart. It was ready to embark a new journey, what I call the ‘story to movie’ journey with Mohan media creations…on Feb 2nd 2009.
Around that time Dill Raju was kind enough to give the title KVM to my subject, which he had registered for his project.. Thank you Raju garu once again… that was really very nice of you.
Watch out for more trivia, snippets and interesting peeps on KVM in the coming days.
-Satish.Kasetty
You can reach Satish at [email protected] |
