I have just managed to catch up with the winner of this month's ReelShow Film of the Month competition winner, RS Prasanna. His film Ranga Plays A Girl won the March/ April award on the site.

Ranga is a 12 year old boy growing up in a south Indian village in the heart of India, circa 1970. His world is turned upside down when he is forced to become the last-minute replacement for a part in Varadhu's village play. The only problem: the role he has to play is that of a girl!

Here's Prasanna who talks a little about making the film, what his influences are, and what's next or him... 

1) Hi Prasanna, tell me a little bit about your background. What got you into filmmaking?

I have a photo of me from Kindergarten where I played a Doctor in a musical. I even remember the song, “Operation just now.” Guess I had performance in my system. In high school I directed small plays in the weekends. In Engineering college, I made short films in my digital handycam, some of which won an award or two. One night (in my twelfth grade) when I was walking back home from a corner shop, holding a bag of groceries for home, I caught myself mouthing imaginary dialogue. It dawned on me that I had been doing this all my life. As I dropped the bag of groceries in the kitchen that night, my career had been decided.


2) Where did you get the idea for the film?

The film is based loosely on a Tamil short story that was reccommended to me by my elder brother. I invested the film with my own twists and turns, drawn from my own childhood experiences. My film is about a young boy asked to don the role of a girl in the village play. Trust me, I knew a thing or two about how that would feel!


3) Tell me about the casting process and pre-production? How did you assemble your crew?

In Chennai we have a vibrant theatre culture. I drew my actors from the pool of brilliant actors that it prides itself with. I was a part of the same community and I knew most of the actors for a long time. The key factor was finding the young chap to play Ranga – that was the make or break role. I did screen tests to gauge camera angles and to see if the kid could pull off the girl's role convinvingly. Uchit, the guy I finally selected was exactly the right age where he still looked cute as a girl. Then I got on to storyboarding with my DOP Krishnan Vasant who is a pleasure to work with, besides beign an extremely gifted artist and a good friend to boot. He had shot my previous film ART too (which won me the Reelshow Indian Filmmaker Aaward last year) and he is a permanent on my team. Since this was my film school thesis film, the crew was drawn from my batch mates and juniors.

4) What did you shoot the film on?

35 mm Kodak film stock.


5) How long was your shoot?

3.5 days with one day constituting 8 hours of work time.


6) Where did you shoot the film?

The film was shot in and around my film school premises, which is bang in thhe middle of busy Chennai city. The openign scene that shows a sprawling green strech of grass is in reality neither sprawling nor green. In our location recce we narrowed down shot angles and camera positions so as to eliminate the towering city buildings and electric cables that surround the ground. There were small pacthes of green here and there and we combined shots to create a feeling of a single space. All of the film was shot that way. My team asked me in the beginning how I plan to create a period film with such a tiny budget. I told them that we would show 1970 india not by recreating it, but by eliminating 2000 India from the landscape. I am lucky that india still rertains touches of the old.


7) I'm interested in how the editing process went as you edited the film as well as everything else? How did you find that?

I had a wonderful editor Vinay who was completely devoid of ego. He told me after he had assembled the rough cut in record time, that the shots cut themselves together. I feared that he was complaining. On the contrary he congragulated me and my DOP for shooting precisely what we needed to tell the story, as we were all workign on a woefully low budget. He understood the classical sensibility of the film and chose to become invisible in his cuts. Our only challenge was cutting the film to precisely one reel (roughly 10 minutes) as that's all the final print we were being given by our film school. But we were not way off the mark in our first cut to begin with, and a little trimming did the job.


8) What did you edit the film on?

Avid.


9) How are you finding things since winning the ReelShow competition?

Reelshow has always been a source of encouragement for me ever since my film ART won the Indian Award. Mary Lou is now more of a friend than an anonymous curator. I love the fact that before I went on to win awards elsewhere, I started winning with Reelshow. I am still eagerly waiting for the annual competition. May the best film win.


10) What's your ambition? What aspect of the industry do you aspire to be involved in?

I aspire to be a skilled filmmaker. I primarily want to be a director doing international projects, but realise that my skills as a screenwriter are finding some acceptance in Bollywood. My personal ambition though is to shoot a book that is very close to my heart, and which I think is enough of a challenge to keep me learning till I die. The book is too comlex to shoot. The book changed my life - “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand. I do not know if I ever will be worthy of it, but I shall strive with all my will.


11) What's next for you? What are you working on at the moment?

I must say things are lookign good (touch wood, touch wood). I am in Bollywood at the moment and in the process of signing some projects on as a screenwriter. My first film as a director has also found resonance with some very reputed producers here, and I am hoping to share the good news first with Reelshow as and when it happens. Like they say, don't believe it till you see the sign on the dotted line. Then again, dont't believe it even then – just to be safe! ;)

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