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Bollywood Film Director Mani Ratnam
Mani Ratnam’s real name is G. Subramaniam and he was born on 2nd June, 1956. His father’s name was Venus Gopal Ratnam and his brother’s name was G. Venkateshwaran. Both is father and his brother where involved in the movie business. His father was a producer while his brother was initially a film distributor and later on started producing films as well. Mani Ratnam completed his graduation from the Madras University in the commerce stream; he completed his higher studies with a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies. He had no intentions of pursuing a film making career at first and started his career as a management consultant and thereafter he became a filmmaker. What is most interesting about his change from being a management consultant is that he never worked as an assistant director with any of his peers or gained knowledge from his father about film making. He never sat with an experienced film making personality to explore what things he would need to do to become a good director before taking the decision of turning into a film director. When he started seeing a lot of movies he got interested in how these movies are made and all the processes involved in film making. This curiosity led him to becoming a film director. It was after he decided that he would pursue a career in filmmaking that he approached his peers like Mahendran and asked him that he would be interested in being his assistant director but the response was – NO. Thereafter, he approached Balu Mahendra for the same job, Mr. Balu immediately asked him of his qualifications in film making or any sort of experience. Mani Ratnam had none, yet seeing his enthusiasm for film making Balu agreed to allow him to get behind the camera in his film. Mani Ratnam has since made numerous movies mainly in Tamil Language and then later when they acquired national fame and appeal he dubbed his movies into other languages like Hindi and Telugu. His first movie was Pallavi Anu Pallavi, it also happened to be Anil Kapoor acting debut. It was made in Kannada language. This movie was about the relationship between an older aged woman and a younger aged man. Thought the movie wasn’t a success at the box office his song sequence filming gave film critics enough idea of his ablities to suggest that in the coming days this director would be a force to reckon with. Many people even today think that since Mani Ratnam is a mainly south based director why is he so popular, as most of his films release there and his Bollywood releases are few and far between. Well the best way to answer this question would be that the range of issues that his movies addresses are not covered in any of the other directors’ movies. Be it Karan Johar, Yash Chopra and Aditya Chopra from Yash Raj Films, Subhash Ghai or any one else but none of them have tackled so many social and serious topics. Mani Ratnam has managed to retain the entertainment value in all of his movies. Family tussles, adoption, love, terrorism, hardships, caste, religion, war, politics, history, religious conflicts and disability are just a few of the issues that this master director has projected in movies. One of his earliest Bollywood releases was Roja, starring Arvind Swamy and Madhubala. The movie as centered on a newly married couple whose husband is kidnapped by terrorist as he is the commander-in-chief of a border area army unit and they wanted something in return for his release. The shooting of a song sequence in snow tipped hills of Kashmir were outstanding. Mani Ratnam hardly chooses international locales for his movies; most of them are shoot at location with India. Only for his recent super hit ‘Guru’ did he go to Turkey to shoot some scenes. Mani Ratnam has his own production company – Madras Talkies. On many occasions Mani Ratnam has made films motivated by real life happenings. His movie Nayagan was the depiction of real happening of the underworld in Mumbai Aayitha Ezhuthu was the story depicting the happenings of students killing classmates with gun assault in Osmania University & a movie depicting war ravaged Sri Lanka titled Kannathil Muthamittal.
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Popular Bollywood Actors
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