With the digital medium, a filmmaker’s discipline is lost: Dr Biju

Malayalam filmmaker

Dr Biju

, aka Bijukumar Damodaran, was in the city to attend the 25th

Kolkata International Film festival

with his latest film, Veyilmarangal. In a candid chat with us, the filmmaker, who worked for both the silver screen and the digital medium, said, “I think I am the only director, among the new filmmakers of Kerala, who has worked with

celluloid

before moving on to the digital medium. My first four films were made on celluloid. I think, with the digital medium, a filmmaker’s discipline is lost. Today, you can take any number of shots, as many footages as you want to. For a two-hour movie, you can shoot for 10 hours, 12 hours or even more. Suppose you have planned a shot and you take it… Then you see a tree that you liked and you shoot that too. And it can go on... Then, the cinema is only decided on the editing table. Earlier, we used to plan every shot for a film. Only after that we would go for proper rehearsal and then we’d shoot it —that too only two or three takes. There were no extra shots. That was because the film used to be (and still is) expensive. For four minutes of shooting, we used to spend about Rs 10,000.”

Dr Biju also admitted that not all filmmakers give up discipline and there are certain advantages in digitisation. But he still thinks it has its own adverse impact. “With digitisation, people are more bothered about the content. No one cares for the technicalities. Many films came with good subjects and with very bad technicalities. That is also an important aspect in filmmaking. But during the era of films, we used to have proper plan and we used to stick to our schedule. We knew what to do and what to expect. Our ratio used to be 3:1. Now the ratio can be anything — 20:1 and so on. Some are shooting 120 hours for one film. And then they cut is short to two hours,” he signed off.