 You wanna tell him what you're drinking, no? Well, he's drinking Chai. Does this look like Chai to you? Bash him in the comments! They do that anyway. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Josh! We have some Corbin. I'm Rick. You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter. It's Juicy. Yeah. Corbin likes to post pictures of me shirtless. Yeah, sometimes I do. It's a Halloween cup, or fall. This is, it says hello Pumpkin. This is really good. It tastes like fall. It's a great fall drink, and it has an aftertaste like pumpkin pie. Mmm. It was a tall, iced Chai latte. Does it taste like cultural appropriation? That's not Chai, am I right, guy? With oat milk, brown sugar syrup, some pumpkin cream, and cinnamon powder. It sounds fall. That's what it sounds. It tastes fall. Mmm. Thank you, Mom. How does that work? I'm gonna get really graphic. Today, we're doing a little interview, and this is actually Money Rottenham. We've actually never done any Money Rottenham. No, we haven't. We've seen, I think, quite a few. Five, six, seven? I think, because it's the three, then there's Dulce, then there's Gurud, then there's- So yeah, that's- That's a puppy, right? That's him. Mmm, that's so six or seven. Yeah, it's around there, so it's a decent amount. We have not seen any interviews of the man. No. But we do appreciate his directing. Which, in case you didn't know, if we don't see an interview about someone, we just assume they don't exist. That's true. Except Ranveer. Yeah, we've seen everything he's ever done. All of his body of work. Anyways, this is- I don't know. It's a Money Rottenham interview. Great, this is a Money Rottenham interview. There you go. No, this is an excerpt from Peter Weber interviewing Money Rotten at the British Film Institute in London. It's a very interesting and insightful interview, the brevity with which Money Sir responds is quite impressive. The scenes in the interview are edited due to the copy infringement rights. I understand. I think you guys would know Peter Weber, the English director who directed Girl with the Pearl Earring. Also, Money Sir is, man, a few words, to make him talk is a Herculean task in itself. Knowing how much you both enjoy film making and the art of film making, I hope you guys will enjoy. Absolutely. They said about LJP, but we got that man to talk. That's true. And he was lovely. He sure was. He was awesome. We've been told that by a couple of people, we were told that Pankaj would be a bit shy. We were told that Nawaz would be shy. I don't know. They've been... They're all wonderful ghosts. Yep. Maybe Money Rotten. I heard that Ranveer is really, really shy. So he needs to prove that by talking to us. I think if he talked with us, he'd probably come out of his shell. And if he doesn't talk to us, then he's just really, really afraid to and just everyone's gonna know how shy he is. Here we go. Looks like it's still afraid. What led you to become a filmmaker? What led you? What was a particular path? I know you came from a filmmaking family, but apparently they didn't even need to watch films when you were growing up. Good cop. Actually, I was a management consultant. I was sort of dissolutioned with my job. Then I decided to move into films as a stopgap to see whether this is what I wanted to. Actually, that was the first step. And I didn't think when I was growing up, I would look at this as a career, to the passion, to something which I liked, which I enjoyed, which I understood a little more than the guy who was sitting next to me in the theater in the screen. And that's all it was. But then you looked at it as an option is to see, if you want to take a chance, you have to do it when you're 22, 23, I thought. It gets more difficult as we get on the air. So that's when I thought I'd see whether I have a play for it. And took some time off and tried to get into it. This might seem like an odd question because whenever people talk about cinema, they don't always talk about the art. But in a way, I suspect that there are some things from your background as a management consultant that have been quite useful in terms of filmmaking. Oh, it was absolutely wonderful, you know, in the sense when I did my first film and I got a break finally and took me quite a while, about two years or so to struggle and convince people to put money into a film and to trust me to direct it. And I went into the film, all set to do a film with all the management techniques that I knew. And four weeks down the line, I had thrown and torn apart every bit of the script was intact, but all the management schedule and the work jacks weren't all over the place. Because I think you understand that in cinema, you know, you kind of reinvent what is written on paper. It is not a duplication, it is not a conversion, direct sense, it is actually reinventing it. Using a completely different language, too many variables. So it is not so easily applicable. You can't take technique in a play. But I think the sense of what any education gives you is a sense of reasoning and a logical approach to things, I think management does it quite a bit. And in a strange way, it helps me a lot when I write scripts. Really? Yeah. That's so wrong. Because I had imagined that you would say, might help you in terms of knowing how to deal with crew or with managing actors or something. How does that help you writing scripts? I think it gives you the sense that you're constantly in the early stages when you start to write a script, you constantly stick back and say, where am I going? What is my goal? Where is my trying to reach? What is my story? And then you take the broader view all the time and then see whether I'm reaching that and approach the problem as not just one way, but look at it and see what are those options. And look at it a little more logically and not just emotionally. Yeah, that's very good. And look at options, look at and constantly step back to be disassociated with it, come back and look at it clinically. Even when you make a film, after you've done the script and you make a film, you get too involved that you see only pixels, but you don't see the picture. So sometimes I've come back and see whether what you originally started with that is still there, the core that drove you, is it still written or is it lost in all the details? You said something interesting just now about the way that a script is a blueprint, but you have to kind of bring it to life, if you're like, are you very precious about the material that you've written or are you quite happy to rip it up and chase a completely different idea when you're actually there on the set? So as we all know, time is money, the clock is ticking, you've got to finish a certain number of scenes during the day, but a scene isn't quite working, how do you get over that? You're struggling to find a way to put the blame on somebody else, that's the biggest problem. Then in India, when we play tennis, we have ball boys there, and invariably the only time you get angry at the ball boy is when you eat a bad short, so it's the same case. So it is tough, it is tough, and the scene is written in a room, in a table, in a computer, and you come there and you put people there and you have light, you have the camera, you have the entire ambience is set, and the people, the actors who are there were delivering, and if it's not working, then you have to come up with something fast and everybody's watching you. You have to pretend you know everything and still come up with that. That's the thing that I find the hardest is when you realise it's going wrong and everyone on the set realise it's going wrong, and at that moment they all look at you. And the clock is ticking and you have to come up with some kind of solution. If you're in the edit suite, then it's fine. You say, stop, you go and you get a cup of tea or a cup of chai or whatever, but when you're on the set you can't. Let's have a look at our first clip. These are mostly in chronological order, so I wanted to take you back. It's a very short clip, 37 seconds. You'll have to forgive my pronunciation because I'm just a stupid English person. So you can correct me if you want. This is a clip from your 1986 film, Mona Raga. Mona Raga. Yeah, there we go. Mona Raga. You can roll the first clip, please. As I told you, some of these clips. Some of these clips are on the quite side of the line. No problem. So how do you feel? When you watch, I have a great problem watching anything like that I've ever made, because the moment I finish it, it's like onwards. How do you feel? I hate it. Nice. It's pretty calm. I mean, I think I understand why it is, but maybe you can tell these people why it is. Well, when you watch, you can watch with this length. It's all right, but beyond that, all you see is only the mistakes. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that didn't work is that because you've sat in the customer room and you've seen it 100, 200, 300 times, that any joy has just disappeared. You're glad that it's out of your life and you don't have anything to do with it. And also, it becomes other people's property. Yeah. Because we make it for other people, really. Yeah. And other people have a lot of opinions. They do indeed. One thing I think that's interesting for me, coming from a different filmmaking tradition to you, is that you not only have to deal with the elements of, let's say, social realism, actors, dialogue, and the rest of it, but with this kind of summon dance thing. Yeah. And so we draw a completely different skill set. It's not about psychology. Yeah. It's about display and it's about choreography and in some ways quite mechanical, but full of the joy of life. Yeah. How on earth do you do that? Great question. Actually, I think, you know, once you accept it as a part of your film, then it's a very liberating process, you know? I mean, it does something which, I think, was very unique to an Indian film. Yeah. And in the flow of a film, this kind of, kind of, lets you reach an arc of celebration, of, you know, of whichever way, whether it is with a joy or whether it is a morose-ness of a sorrow, or whichever emotion you go to, this will let you travel that in a very abstract fashion. You're not born with logic. Right. You're born by, you know, literary movement. It just gives you an abstraction which lets you fly and land back at a completely different point and get across what is inside a person's mind in a different fashion. I think it's a very liberating thing. So it's like liberating the subtext in a way. Yeah, yeah. I think it is in the sense that it comes out of actually of the oral tradition in India, you know? I mean, over the years, they've always had this tradition of telling stories, you know, across not written but orally and all their texts have come through like that. And they've all come through with, you know, with text and with music in between, with phrases, with verses in between. And sitting on emotion, yeah. When you grow up as a child, you listen to it with a man telling you this great epic of Mahabharat and in between he breaks into a song. Right. And he tells you and that gives you, you know, the pause to take in a situation, take in where you reached and lands you into the next thing. So it's kind of, if it is used very well, I think it's a tremendous tool. I'm really sad that you guys don't have that. So, Mahabharat. That's, there's two things, two formal questions I wanted to ask about that because when I was, you know, doing some research for our conversation, this is a quote I came across. Sometimes quotes from the internet are completely wrong. So I'm just, I'm going to put this quote to you and you can tell me whether you've had some truth in it or is it just bullshit? That's the technical term bullshit. I admire how Mani Ratnam delves into Hindu mythology and creates contemporary renderings of it. So that Roja is actually the story of Savitri and Satyavan retold and that the relationship of the brothers in Dalipatti is in fact, drawn from the story of Kana and Arjuna. Yeah. Okay, come on, we can do better than just say it. Can for him accepting a yes and a no for him. Expand a little bit. Yeah, actually, you know, to pick something that you've grown up with, which has been written years and years and years back and find it relevant today, in today's world, in today's context, that it is happening in front of you and it is still, the emotion is still the same. Whatever was there, if it is, you know, just replanted into this situation, you still get the same emotion, you know what I mean? So somewhere classics are made out of that. Yeah. You know, something that lives time, that gets through this. So it is true, it is true that Roja's base is really from, I mean, from a old, you know, classical story of a woman, of a wife, fighting with the God of death for her husband's life. You know what I mean? It is a fantastic story, but you know, she won't let the God of death take her husband away. And when you work with this material, do you find the story and then it reminds you of something from these epics, or do you start with the epic and then try and find something contemporary? It works both ways. I think in terms of Roja, it goes the other way. It is what is happening around us and the fact that it kind of resembles something which I've known all along. Right. You know, it, it touches the same core. Yeah. It's completely different. You're dealing with something else that is contemporary. I don't like when you do a Shakespeare now, right? Yeah, similar. Very similar. So it was, whereas when you take the other film, Thalapathy, for example, that is based out of two characters out of Mahabharata. Yeah. And that came from the Mahabharata, that started with the Mahabharata, then it became a contemporary. I think it's something that is very strong. I mean, obviously it's the case in Indian culture, but in Western culture it happens maybe a bit more than people realize. So for example, Star Wars. I think one of the reasons it has been so successful with audiences, it's, the work is very much based on Joseph Campbell, Hero of the Thousand Faces, which is to do with analysing mythology and finding a way. So I actually think there's very few stories. Yeah. As you know. And this is a way of reaching back into something that has been around for a very long time and has a kind of strong international resonance. Let me ask you a more practical question about a sequence like this. How do you put it together? You have dancers, you have a choreographer. How much is planning in advance? How much on the day? How much do you storyboard? Just some of the nuts and bolts. Oh, okay. I'll go with the reverse. The storyboard is zero. Really? Yeah. Okay. Zero. Just, we couldn't graph it. Right. Before? Yeah. But when you say before, during rehearsals? Yeah. Not on the day. When the music is gone, we are ready for the song. We get it composed. Yeah. And we get the actors to train for that song. Yeah. So we take a few days off and let the get set. And then we go and shoot. And we have a deadline. And these are regional films where we cannot afford to stretch at all. So we have to do it really fast. So a sequence like this would be how long? This is maybe a four minute song. You're taking us two and a half days. Three and a half days at all. So you're really working, working, working very quick. Yeah. Okay. And how long are you allowed, because there's all kinds of union roles in the UK in terms of how long you can keep. I mean, how long can you work these guys for? How long is it? How long is it shooting then? How much can I say publicly? The regulations are slightly looser. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's all. Okay. Yep. Not a union. So your day starts when the sun comes up and it stops when the sun comes down. It goes down. Yeah, mostly. But sometimes we stretch into the night. Okay. And we do night work. All right. Very good. I think time for our next clip. And this is Nayakhan? Nayakhan. Okay. And this is a film from 1987. It was in the second clip, please. One of the things I love about this scene is the restraint, the way that you're just, you're looking at the faces of those actors and you hold and you hold and you hold. We know what is there, but you only really reveal in a wonderful kind of operatic moment you come. Oh. Well, that's not the end of the interview. I think they probably should have cut off with Boo when they did the clip. Yeah. Not in the middle of a question. But really good interview. Great interview. I mean, it says part one. So obviously there's more parts to this, but it was really good. I thought the interviewer was asking good questions. Some of the questions we've asked to some of the directors and actors we've talked to. Yeah, it's a 45 minute interview maybe and you don't want to do the whole thing in one. Shlubang, so totally get that. But yeah, and it's funny that last part about the crew, I think I've told the story before where I was talking on set about when we, we did the interview and got the behind the scenes stuff about Jelly Katsu and the lighting. And I was talking to a couple of the other actors and the assistant director was standing with me while they were setting up the shot. And we were talking about technical stuff. And I mentioned the interview and mentioned how they shot with the lamps and the first thing the assistant director said was yeah, that's cause they don't have a union. Yeah. Cause the fire laws they were breaking and the labor laws climbing in the trees and putting real fire in the trees. And that's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. Yeah. It's a blessing, I guess, and a curse for the workers cause they might be working 18 hours a day. Yes. And they want the money. Which is also why probably a lot of white actors are terrible because if you're getting a SAG actor that comes with rules, they come with a union. And there's a reason there's a union is because this industry has notoriously abused their workers. In fact, as we say this, there's negotiations going on between crew that works in television and film and the producers and in terms of this very thing, hours work, wages paid. So very common. But I really liked having somebody, it's all the difference in the world because one of the things we get to do as SAG members is we're invited to come to see what are called SAG screeners. If a film is nominated for a SAG award, you get to go watch it. And typically the filmmakers are there, the actors, the directors, and there's questions that are asked. The person asking the question and their understanding and love for a film makes all the difference in the world because I've seen people questioning and struggling and the actors are there just hoping they're gonna ask them a relevant question. Was that when we saw the question and it was it Willem Dafoe or was it a different actor? Willem had a good questioner. The last time I remember a question that wasn't good, I don't know if it was the one we went to. Yeah, it was. Oh, it was. Who was it? It was and we were, it was Willem Dafoe. And he was great regardless. And we pointed out how he just got past it. I thought it was Willem Dafoe. Yeah, because the person asking the questions was just not aware of what he was doing. No, no. And he clearly is a, he's a filmmaker, so he knows what he's talking about. That was fun to watch. Really intriguing, really good answers, stuff like, I feel like since we've been in this world for almost three years now, one, we get a lot of the movie references for one, but we also know a lot of the answers. Right. Like, since we've talked to a lot of these people, we know that there's not unions. We know how they kind of do song ones and kind of what he echoed about, about the songs and what they mean and stuff. Cause we've grown to, like, it's actually, guys, I famously said, yeah, I don't like songs and stuff. And I still sometimes don't. But if it's done the correct way that a lot of Indian films do it, right, then I've grown to appreciate that. Correct. Just as I was amazed by, while we were watching the Opu trilogy and I was reading a book about Satyajit Rai and had a revelation about Eastern storytelling compared to Western storytelling and how that is influenced Indian filmmaking, which is the specificity of, in Western storytelling, which comes straight from the Greeks all the way through the Roman Empire, through Shakespeare, which is the Western mindset for storytelling, it's always been about having a story that has a through line and you have action that becomes a conflict and a climax and a resolution and you see an arc with your characters. Well, Indian storytelling doesn't need that to be a good story. And from our vantage point, when we first started to look at the films, we would critique it from that vantage point and say, there was no character arc. There was no conflict, climate, some resolution. And it was the Opu trilogy that I appreciated. A lot of times we're just gonna wanna be in a place and what the film is gonna depict is not character or story driven. It's going to put you in a place and time and feel something for a while. And then also what he said about, he hates watching his work, very common. Very common. And he's right, not only do you hate watching yourself, I hate watching myself in terms of acting or something I did, it's just because literally all you see is the mistakes or what you could have done better. And so you can't look at it objectively. Yeah, I have mixed emotions about it. I will watch my work because I wanna see if it translated. And sometimes it's worked and other times it hasn't. I remember when I watched Barbarian for the first time, I was really scared when I watched it. And I remember the first time I watched myself switching from Peter in Regulus and I went, it worked. That was great. But then I remember watching me do Fagin for the first time and as much as I was in the moment and was in the character and I love the vocal template, what the Fagin I saw in here, when I saw him here, I went, that's not Fagin. That's me. And I didn't wanna watch it. I don't like watching me be Fagin because it's not him. Yeah, even directing like, for the videos we have to even done for the channel, like when I did Heather, I was so happy to just get it done. I was done with the editing process. I was just sick and tired of that. I was sick and tired of learning the line. So I couldn't even like look at it and think, I guess, that's all I'm like, I don't know. And so you have to have a third party come in and like when we did our million, I was absolutely exhausted with hearing that song. Yeah. And you love that song. I love that song. Like I'm telling you, I've listened to that song. One, Leland, that was Leland's favorite song for ever cause I listened to it so much too for preparation. But like I was just, I couldn't even see it objectively. I'm like, I don't know. I can't. And then once it's out, you're like, okay, finally. Done. I don't have to think about this anymore. That's why sometimes like, I've seen this happen with Avengers questions with like Mark Rylance and other people on the panel. You'll get Avenger fans that are encyclopedic in their knowledge of the Marvel universe. And the actors are like, I hope that I'm not asking that question cause I don't know when I should cause I'm that freaking character because I memorized it for the movie and then we did it. And then it's in my brain and it's out and done. Especially since a lot of times when they do those interviews, it's almost a year later. Right. And then you'll, then you get stuff like for Star Trek, you get people 30 years later in episode this, they know the episode number and they know the scene. I've seen Bill Shatner getting questions and he's like, I'm sorry. I don't even remember that episode. Yeah. But yeah, great interview. I love really good. Let us know what other interviews from him, other directors and what should be the next Manny Rottenham film that we watch? Let us know down below. Josh!