THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Resul Pookutty, who has won this year’s Oscar nomination for sound mixing, attributes his achievement to his growing up in Kerala where he learned elements of in-sync technique from movies of Malayalam masters.
“Sound designing and mixing were never a good production aspect in Bollywood until Black was screened. But I grew watching films in Malayalam like Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Elippathayam and Aravindan’s Kummatti, Pokkuveyil and Thampu where the sublime use of sound represents the cultural context,” Resul said addressing a meet-the-press program here.
“Devadas and Krishnanunny have done immensely truthful work in these films. My work is an extension of theirs. Their works taught me the art of blending technology with aesthetics,” he said. “The Oscar nomination has come as a big boost to Indian technicians whom the Hollywood and European cinema used to look down upon.”
The Kerala sound designers perfected the technique of on-the-spot recording, which earned Resul international acclaim two decades later. He says he had to spend many sleepless nights to perfect his sync-sound technique and the hard work paid off.
“In translation, what’s lost is the original. So I decided to capture the entire mood and emotions of actors straight from the acoustic place where they perform. That’s actually the essence of the film,” he said.
Slumdog Millionaire is currently on a “rollercoaster ride” all over the world. It has already received 107 international nominations and 87 awards and “is still counting.”
He says his membership in the elite Acoustical Society of America is the highest honor in a sound recording that one can achieve in his field. “I won this before the Oscar nomination but nobody cared. Now you all are chasing me,” he said in a lighter vein.
“One of the first calls I received from Mumbai after the nomination was from Amitabh Bachchan who said he was proud of me being an Indian,” Resul said. “I told him, sir, this is a call that millions of Indians long to receive.”
Born in Vilakkupaara village near Anchal, Kollam, in Kerala as the eighth child of a Muslim couple. Resul, 37, also received a rousing welcome in his village Wednesday evening. Resul shifted his base camp to Mumbai a decade ago after graduating from the Film and Television Institute in Pune.
“Slumdog brought back memories of my school days when I used to walk every day to the local government school six kilometers away. I went to the school for play and fun and learned a lot of things during the journey to the school and back,” he said. “But the free noon meal was the main attraction for many of us. Destiny is what the film is also all about.”
He graduated in physics and joined the Government Law College here before enrolling at the film institute and moving to Mumbai which he terms as “a natural immigration as a graduate of the institute.”
Resul debuted in sound design with Rajat Kapoor’s 1997 film Private Detective: Two Plus Two Plus One and got his big break with the critically acclaimed film Black, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. His credits include Musafir (2004), Zinda (2006), Traffic Signal (2007), Gandhi, My Father (2007), Saawariya (2007), Dus Kahaniyaan (2007) and Gajini (2008).
“Now sound has been recognized as an art and it has fast become a challenging job with wider acceptance,” he says. “Like we have seen in Elippathayam, a sound can convey much more than a million words”.
The emotions of actors are best captured while they are performing, not inside the studios where it is recreated. So the new-generation Bollywood directors realize the significance of in-sync technology. Lagan and Black are perfect examples.
Resul holds Slumdog director Danny Boyle in high esteem. “He’s an unpredictable man. For him, everything is spontaneous. He wanted to catch up with the real life as it is. That’s how Slumdog was born,” he says.
Boyle stayed in Mumbai for seven months and scanned every nook and cranny of the city. He found a smile on the lips of those living in slums.
“By the time the film started shooting, he knew the city better than me,” says Resul. “I was the only Indian technician in the film. It was frustrating. I even feared that my work would get eliminated when the film was edited.”
