The art of story telling

For a long time i've wondered how directors convince producers to fund their films. When someone shares their experiences during their interviews i used to find it unconvincing. How can some guy, especially if he is a first-time director, convince someone to spare crores of rupees to fund a story!! How convincing that guy had to be in effectively making the other person part with their hard-earned money!! And how gullible they sound if they are throwing good money after bad at some guy who had narrated a story, how much ever interesting it may be!! And to top it all, most of the time the producers borrow money at cutthroat interest rates to fund those projects, more often than not ending up with debt that has proved fatal in many a case!! And imagine the skill of those story tellers who doesn't just make you fund their dreams but also push you to the extent that you borrow money to pay you!!! And despite knowing that 9 out of ten movies fail miserably, there are still so many people who, not having any background about movies, still march in everyday with money in hand and dreamy eyes, wondering how many times their investment will pay back in return!! If you want to answer these questions, just watch the interview by Suresh Krishna.

There is a program called "milestone" that airs on "Touring talkies" YouTube channel. Oh my god!! that guy can tell a story!!! And that too he wasn't narrating an actual movie story, but what happened during the shooting and behind the scenes. If he could narrate those incidents so beautifully, imagine what magic he would've weaved around his own stories!! I was so engrossed in his narration that at times i could actually visualize the events he was describing. One example being, about an accident that occurred during a shooting in North India, when the bus carrying the technical crew fell down a gorge. Suresh being the only person who speaks hindi was one of the survivors with minimal injuries. There were more than half dozen people dead and several injured fatally and all of them stuck in a land where no one speaks their tongue or any known person around to help. This was during a time when there were no mobile phones and even STD calls were a luxury. He explains how passerby's and people working on petrol bunks and lorry drivers and everyone who came their way, went out of their way to help them reach hospital and how a mother of one of the patients on nearby bed, prepared curd rice for all of them knowing their situation, with her own kin in sick bed!! The tales of humanity and the compassion with which people helped them were so emotional. If you thought this, was it, then he narrated the other even that followed this incident. For those who were dead, they had to be cremated and somehow the bodies were transported to the cremation ground. Suresh being the only person on ground, accompanied by one other colleague, was clueless and was frozen emotionally, wondering how lonely those bodies looked like in a foreign land, far away from their relations and literally no one to shed a tear or grieve their loss, other than those two, an old lady comes all of a sudden and cries her heart out "Muruga" "Muruga" and it was almost as if a divine event was unfolding in front of them, sheerly based on the humaneness of her action!! When Suresh was recollecting the incident, anyone who was listening to him could visualize the old lady in a gloomy crematorium and goosebumps would be the least thing you be noticing!!! I thought, in all my silliness, if there is a movie that can absorb this scene, it would be a sure shot clap worthy effort if picturized properly, only for the reason that the narrator is a movie person and not in any way to trivialize the incident. To remember such a traumatic incident is one thing, to recollect it is another thing, to tell it in a way that touches your heart is a whole new level of communication!! No wonder people melt and go bonkers in funding their projects!! The guru bakthi Suresh krishna had for his guru K.Balachandar was all the more evident across the episodes and it was all the more classy, when he recently mentioned about the fight he had with him during the very first movie of his when KB scolded him royally while he went to share the invitation. It made the respect for Suresh grow multifold in my eyes!! What a person he must be to be talking about a person in such glowing terms for over several episodes only to mention lightly the most embarrassing way in which he was treated by the same person on the most important day of his life!!
Before watching this interview, i hardly was following him and knew him vaguely as the invisible director behind the two Rajini blockbusters of Annamalai and Baasha. But after this interview, he has shown all the more brightly as a very solid human being who can surely tell a tale!!!