The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : He came through the cut and thrust of film world

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Aug 13, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

He came through the cut and thrust of film world

`Editor' Mohan

The man known in the film industry as `Editor' Mohan has come a long way. In a career spanning more than 50 years, he has edited more than 500 films and worked with veterans and nearly in all of Devar Films' movies. He has dubbed 25 films into Tamil. He was a pioneer in bringing English films to city theatres with intermediate negative. Mohan talks to S.R. Ashok Kumar about his long career and his experiences.

"Everyone says a film is made on two tables: a screenplay writing table and an editing table. I was really fortunate to work with giants such as S. Balachander, B. Vittalacharya and M.M. Chinnappa Devar of Devar films.

Devar always asked me to do the first negative cut for all his films, irrespective of whether I was the editor or not. I learned a lot from both Vittalacharya and Devar on making good commercial cinema. A happy moment in my career was in 1979. It was an English documentary film, `Last of Wild,' which ran to nearly 60,000 feet. I edited it to 14 thousand feet and it was a success. .

"Another challenge came to me in the form of "Circus world," a Russian film, which was shown in Safire, but it did not run even for three days. I re-edited it and released it. It ran for nearly 13 weeks." The Tamil film `Samanthipoo' with Sivakumar and Shoba in the lead was in progress when Shoba died. The director requested Mohan to use his editing skills and finish the film in a way the audience would not know of Shoba's absence. Mohan did it with out any problem and was appreciated by all.

Editor Mohan has produced nine films in Telugu and three in Tamil. Eight of them were mega hits. When actor Chiranjeevi experienced a slump in his career, Mohan produced and supervised the editing of `Hitler,' which revived his fortunes.

Mohan's first Tamil film as producer was `Oru Thottil Kuzhanthai,' for which he did the story, screenplay, editing. An old hand at editing, Mohan has also mastered the recent technique of AVID editing. "Everyone thought I would not be able to edit with the AVID equipment. All my recent films were with AVID and it saves me time and energy."

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