A Night with Martin Scorsese and Gautham Menon!!

It’s not every day that you get to talk to people like Gautham Menon. Thanks to RTFF, had a great night watching Gautham Menon curate Martin Scorsese’s movies. Though Gautham didn’t attempt much of curating stuff, surprisingly he liked interacting with the audience more. I haven’t attended an RTFF before. So I had no idea what was it going to be like. But as obvious as it seems Gautham’s handpicked Scorsese movies didn’t disappoint. The list included ‘Casino’, ‘Raging Bull’ and ‘Good Fellas’. Though you can’t help feeling at some point, like you are watching the same movie 3 times because of the repeating appearances of Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and others in all the 3 movies, Scorsese’s plot and his way of storytelling saves you from that.

I’m sure most of us who know Gautham less, have an image of him like, not so easy going character or to be more colloquial, a head-weighted guy. But believe me, you’ve got it all wrong. He is so humble and funny. There’s a reason to why I say that. Just when he entered the event, the organizers played some clips from his movies. On seeing that, his first reaction, was this “I thought it was Martin Scorsese’s night. Why are you playing all these crap?”

When a guy asked him, “Why is that you always do movies with some well known heroes? And why didn’t you try doing movies with completely new faces? Are you afraid to do that?” He immediately reverted back saying, “I have also made a film with completely new faces. Nadunisi Naygal. Even I attempted that movie without any music. But then, that movie hardly ran 2 weeks in theatre! May be I will try again in future” How many directors here have the guts to accept that their own movie bombed at box office? I still hear people say, ‘Kuruvis’ and ‘Suras’ ran 100 days in theatre!!

Interestingly when someone asked him, in spite of some really good movies coming up in Tamil , why is it that still heroes are seen jumping from buildings to buildings, fighting 10 villains at a time and stuff like that, he replied, “ I will answer this question if you guys promise that this won’t go on YouTube..” But then even after knowing that’s impossible, he answered the question, “I just had a discussion with a hero, a few days ago and after myself narrating an interesting detective script to him he felt like the script is not much heroic and it had negative shades and that it will not suit him and finally he turned it down..”  Someone from behind whispered, “May be he is still expecting a Perarasu kinda script from you and you disappointed him with a good script..”  

Another great thing is that Gautham is keen on remaking ‘Goodfellas’. When asked whom would he cast for the remake, his answer was, “May be Kamal and Surya can pull it up..” Now that’s something, isn’t it? But he himself admitted, “ Believe me, these guys will never come together..” May be. But if that happens, that will be one hell of a movie.

When everything was going fine, suddenly everyone was stunned by a question. “Where would you see, 10 years from now?” WTF?! Before Gautham could answer, someone yelled, “ Dai **** Kekuran paaru kelvi“ Obvious anger. Must be one of those kid over dosed with placement trainings. Very obvious these days. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a nice experience. Though I’m used to watch movies all night, watching movies on an open terrace with lot of movie buffs and interacting with the most special Gautham Menon was really something special.