FACE TO FACE
‘I’m sensitive to sound’
K. SANTHOSH
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With an Oscar nomination tucked under his belt, Resul Pookutty talks about “Slumdog Millionaire” and the art of picking and choosing sounds.
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Photo: K.K. Najeeb
Sonic paint job: Resul Pookutty.
Prick up your ears. Random noises draw your attention to the visuals. You hear susurrations of distant traffic, the babble of voices in the streets, the hum of computers, the cacophony of sounds in slums, yelps, roars, ricochets and occasionally frag
ments of birdsong.
They form the first coat of the sonic paint job that Resul Pookutty does in “Slumdog Millionaire”. He fuses them with dialogue and an evocative score to fashion a hit-you-in-the-gut track that got him an Oscar nomination for sound mixing. Shortly before he was nominated for the Academy awards, along with Ian Tapp and Richard Pryke, Pookutty won the BAFTA nomination in the best sound category and is one of the five sound-mixing nominees for the Cinema Audio Society (CAS) Award.
On a cloudy afternoon as he sits down for an interview at a Kerala hotel, basking in the glory of the triple nomination, Pookutty is surrounded by a bevy of relatives, his siblings, nephews and nieces. Leaning back in his chair, he cautions the kids, “Don’t make noise. I’m sensitive to sound.”
He recalls challenges in the work for “Slumdog Millionaire”. “Recording the dialogue was not easy with multiple cameras whirring together. I had to re-invent my techniques. I placed a microphone in a hole bored in a computer facing Anil Kapoor.”
He dismisses the barrage of negative publicity against the film. “You are free to like or dislike the film; appreciation is relative! But accusing Danny Boyle of peddling poverty and exploiting child actors from slums is unfair. He was born in a working-class family. I found him caring, responsible and sensitive.”
Pookutty and his peers have re-defined the role of sound designers in Indian cinema. A sound designer is responsible for everything the audience hears — music scores, dialogue, Foleys and sound effects. “Till Bhansali’s “Black” lit up the cinematic firmament, no one in India paid attention to the sound designer,” he observes.
Audio collage
The story of a deaf, mute and blind girl in “Black” saw Pookutty knock together an abstract audio collage in which words dissolved into ever-changing patterns of ambient noise. The sound became a “character” in the narrative. “I thought: what is the sound of nothing? I communicated with hearing-impaired people and gathered how they respond to sound. A hearing-impaired man told me all he hears is a muted hum. That piece of information formed the basis for designing sounds for scenes featuring Rani Mukherji,” Pookutty states. He stripped out the key ambient sounds recorded for the scenes and retained the silences. Ghostly tail-ends of dialogue slipped into a void. “I experimented with novel, complexly textured sounds. I wanted the track to be totally fresh and different,” he recalls.
The less the sound is noticed, as master designer Walter Murch puts it, the more powerful it becomes. “Sound crosses the Berlin Wall of consciousness without alerting the border guards,” Murch adds. It should facilitate “a simultaneous leap of the audience through the membrane of the screen, like that of Alice through the looking-glass, like a dream the audience is having.”
Pookutty’s thoughts ran on a similar track while designing sound for Feroz Abbas Khan’s “Gandhi, My Father”. “A heavy track like that of ‘Ghajini’ would not have suited the Gandhian theme. It would have gone against the philosophy Khan’s film was rooted in. The film remains close to my heart. There are elements in it I identify with.”
He also relates to “Slumdog Millionaire”. “I recognise the teen from the Mumbai slums, the hero. I empathise with the eternal struggler in him. I grew up in a nondescript Kerala village and walked six km to school every day. I had just Rs. 200 in my bank account when I went to Mumbai seeking work as a sound-engineering graduate. I starved at times. I worked day and night to get a toe-hold in the industry,” he remembers.
After the 81st Academy Awards, he will pick and choose sounds for Rajat Kapoor’s “Rectangular Love Story”, Saurabh Shukla’s “Pappu Can’t Dance Sala”, Sharath’s “Rangeen in Love” and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s upcoming production. But right now, as the Oscars near, the only sounds he hears are those of his heart: Thud. Thud. Thud...
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