There’s a searing, almost unnerving honesty that emerges when Mani Ratnam speaks about his craft—a disarming candour that lays bare his inner workings. He is an original, a man either oblivious to the mythic pedestal on which he’s placed or deliberately dismissive of it.
Early in his conversation with filmmaker Gautham Menon at the 55th International Film Festival of India, this becomes strikingly clear. “I thought I’d make one film and become a master,” he confesses, this man so widely considered a master of cinema. “But it has never felt like that. It’s still like the first film every time.”
In this humility lies the secret to how he carries the burden of expectation, and how he faces inevitable comparisons to the classics that have defined him. It’s not enough for us that he reunites with Kamal Haasan for a new project—we must summon Nayagan into every conversation.
But to Mani Ratnam, the perception of legend is a mirage, an echo that does not guide his hand. This isn’t false humility; it’s a man reverent before the vastness of his craft even after four decades. It’s a man still humbled by the blank page, still daunted by the leap from imagination to reality. “I still don’t know whether I can put together a film cogently,” he admits. “This realisation brings you down to earth, no matter what has happened, good or bad.”
This isn’t a legend wearing praise lightly—it’s a student of cinema, zen-like in his internalisation of accolades and criticisms alike.
In a world of rehearsed platitudes, Mani Ratnam’s unfiltered thoughts are a revelation. He is, in this way, not unlike his legendary collaborator Ilaiyaraaja—sharp, candid, and refreshingly indifferent to diplomacy. When asked if Ponniyin Selvan might have worked better as a web series, he quipped, “I never dreamt of Ponniyin Selvan as content you could watch on the television, pause, attend phone calls, and resume watching.”
The dry humor gets you laughing, but his words are a window into his deeper artistic ethos. He follows up with characteristic self-deprecation: “I’m happy to be struggling with two-three hours of cinema. If I had to make a TV series for six-seven hours, I think I’d get lost.” It’s not deflection; it’s an honest acknowledgement of his discomfort with the sprawling, episodic medium.
Beneath all this quick humour though, lies a filmmaker’s restless pursuit of artistic elevation. For instance, Gautham Menon pointed out how Mani Ratnam often places his actors in movement—Vikram teetering on a parisal in Raavanan, or moving about on a restless horse in Ponniyin Selvan. “It’s good to keep the actors moving,” Mani Ratnam remarked with a glint in his eye, eliciting laughter first, then introspection. He continued,
“With the Raavanan scene, we didn’t know how we’d shoot it until the night before. As a filmmaker, you worry that the script isn’t enough—that you aren’t doing more with it. We brought the parisal all the way from Mysore for that shot. For Ponniyin Selvan, the restless horse was a way to capture Karikalan’s wild essence. You want the actors to create not just a moment, but a living, breathing environment.”
Suddenly, a gallery of iconic images from his cinema rushes to mind: Madhavan and Shalini exchanging glances near a train track in Alaipayuthey, Simran wading through war-torn Sri Lanka in Kannathil Muthamittal, Vikram standing, arms outstretched, becoming one with nature in Raavanan. These are not mere moments; they are testaments to a filmmaker unwilling to rest on the written word, compelled instead to enrich it with movement and atmosphere.
Even in moments of great conviction—such as his belief that certain literature resists cinematic adaptation—Mani Ratnam leaves room for doubt. It is this Socratic wisdom, this willingness to admit what he does not know, that underscores his greatness. “Maybe they can be made into cinema; I guess I don’t know how to,” he says. “When I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is written in first person, I could never imagine it being made into a film. And then, when you watch it, you see the brilliance of its adaptation. It finds a completely different language.” Reflecting on his own struggles with adapting Ponniyin Selvan, he adds, “It’s an art I need to learn more of.”
Such conversations are framed as masterclasses, with eager audiences hoping to distil lessons from the filmmaker’s words. And while the dialogue does indeed shed light on adaptation, visual storytelling, and collaboration, the most profound takeaway is far simpler: the endless thirst for improvement, the absence of ego, the quiet strength in admitting, “I don’t know.” So, when Gautham Menon, in closing, asked Mani Ratnam for a verse that might summarise his life and career, the legend’s casual response felt like poetry: “I don’t know.”
In this column, the writer reflects on the experiences of each day at the 55th International Film Festival of India, Goa