TARSEM
So Singh, driven, financed it himself. “This is an obsession I wish I hadn’t had,” he told the LA Times. “It was just something I needed to exorcise. You have to make your personal films when you’re still young. I knew if I didn’t do it now, it would never happen.”
AVC: So with The Cell, there were parts you felt you had to do for the studio, which were poorly received. And then there were the parts you did for yourself, which were pretty universally praised—the visuals, the cinematography, the fantasy. Are you satisfied with that as a legacy for that film? If people got the half of it you cared about, is that enough?
T: Yes. The only reason I would say, "Oh, I'm absolutely fine with that" is that it's a $40 million first film, and you can see my style in it. Very rarely can anybody on a first studio film say "Yeah, I can see enough of me reflected in there to say it's fine." This is not a poem that you can write on a piece of paper. It is not a piece of art that people can discover later, because you made it in a basement. It requires so much financing and planning.
AVC: Given the visual tableaux you lay out in your films, it almost seems like you have more of a photographic sensibility than a cinematic one. Did you have any interest in photography, or go out of your way to get an education in photography?
T: I don't. My dad took lots of photographs when we were kids, and they were all in negatives, just sitting around. My mom gave them to me, and as a present to all my siblings, I made an album. It's shocking, it just looks like a time capsule. It's like seeing Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now—you think, "Oh my God, he's so old now, and he looks so young and beautiful in the film, and he looks exactly like he could walk out of there." For me, those photographs did that. And a friend of mine recently said, "My God! Look at your dad's tableaux!" As kids, he'd take us places and line us up height-wise, or have us make a pyramid. We'd be like, "Why doesn't dad do pictures like normal people, just throwaway, people-having-fun photos?" [Laughs.] So I looked at those, and I thought, "My God! There is a gene for this!"
But no, I didn't have any photographic background, even though one of my biggest influences was my second girlfriend in college, who was a photographer. The people in the photo department were 20 million times harder-working than the people in the film department. You know, it was just really, really thought about, what they put in front of the camera, which sometimes you have to do and sometimes you don't, when you're doing film. A lot of times, you just have to get out of the way of people doing a good performance. And sometimes you actually need to put what you are thinking, what's is in your head, in front of the camera. You know, like I said, there's absolutely nothing special about me. There's genotype plus environment makes phenotype. My genes, there's about another billion of me in India. I think my environment was very interesting, growing up in the Himalayas, and going to Iran—exposure to just different things at an early life just have made me the person I am. There's nothing else special there at all.
I find myself in a position same as yours when planning for this. My wife likes to have pictures taken but she has no idea I am putting this together. In fact, I had no idea how it all was turning out myself. It sort of assembled itself organically.
I might be reading too much into it, but I do find it a master stroke to have made a stab at the culture that treats love as a commodity. The light-hearted moments are not lost for their message with deserved gravity.