Imaginary dialogue between A.R. Rahman and Imtiaz Ali
by Charactorium · Imtiaz Ali (1971 — ?) · Performing Arts · Visual Arts · Culture · 6 min read
It is in the studio of Panchathan Record Inn in Chennai, at the end of 2015, that A.R. Rahman receives Imtiaz Ali between two mixing sessions. The speakers softly play an unfinished melody, and the scent of cardamom tea floats in the dim studio. The two men have known each other since Rockstar, that film where the music was composed even before the dialogues. Rahman, who experienced this unique method from the inside, has come to ask the filmmaker what always precedes the image for him: sound, the road, and the search for self.
—Imtiaz, do you remember when you came to see me for Rockstar: you wanted the melodies before the scenes. Why reverse the usual order like that?
You who lived through it with me, A.R., know that it wasn't a whim. When I arrived with the idea of Jordan, that musician who must suffer to create, I didn't have a single line of dialogue. I needed the pain to exist first in sound, not in words. So I asked you and Mohit Chauhan to compose before I wrote. And I built every scene around your melodies. At Bollywood, you paste a song onto an already-shot film; I do the opposite. Music doesn't accompany my story; it gives birth to it. An emotion reaches me through a note, never through a line. That's why I listen to you on repeat even before I know what my film is about.
Music doesn't accompany my story; it gives birth to it.
—When I give you a melody, you say you write the scene around it. Is it really the music that commands, or you who tames it?
It commands, believe me. When you hand me a melody, I don't try to fit it into an already conceived scene: I listen to where it wants to go, what light it calls for, what silence it demands before bursting out. For me, music is not a sound backdrop placed behind images. It is the film itself, its emotional backbone. A character often first appears to me as a musical color before having a face. I listen to your compositions on the train, on location scouts, at night, until the scene draws itself. The actors sense it: they perform to a tempo they don't yet know, but which inhabits them. At Bollywood they find my method strange, almost backward. But it's the only one I know to stay honest with emotion.
A character often first appears to me as a musical color before having a face.
—Before cinema, there was the stage. You who started in theater in Delhi, what did the stage teach you that the film set doesn't?
Theater, at the IPTA in Delhi, was my foundational school, long before any camera. On stage, there are no cuts, no second takes: the actor must live the moment, not play it. That truth I carry into every scene I direct. In cinema you can cheat, redo, edit; in theater you are naked before the audience. There I learned the weight of a silence, how a body occupies space, how dialogue breathes. That's why my films remain intimate, dialogue-driven, almost whispered at times. I ask my actors not to perform but to inhabit the moment, exactly like on a Delhi stage. Even when I entrust you with a melody, A.R., it's that demand for lived truth that I seek to bring into the film.
In theater, the actor must live the moment, not play it — I carry that into every scene.
—You direct your actors differently than others, they say. This very physical way of guiding them — does it also come from the stage?
Entirely. On a theater stage, you learn that the actor is a body before being a voice. At IPTA, we would rehearse a simple gesture, an entrance, a look for hours. So on my sets, I don't just have them say lines: I take my actors into the location, I make them walk, wait, get lost. For Highway, I took Alia Bhatt on the roads for several weeks before shooting, so that she would inhabit the character instead of composing it. I often let the camera roll after the clapper, because truth arrives in the unexpected, in improvisation. Theater taught me that patience: you don't fabricate an emotion, you let it happen. A set, for me, remains a stage where we seek the right moment together, humbly.
You don't fabricate an emotion, you let it happen.
—In Highway, the road devours everything — Rajasthan, Himachal, Kashmir. What are you really looking for on those paths where you take your characters?
The road, for me, is never just a backdrop: it's a metaphor for the journey we all must undertake inside ourselves. In Highway, that kidnapped young woman finds, by moving away from cities, a freedom no home offered her. I shot with a light crew, a small scout camera, as close as possible to real landscapes. Physical movement triggers inner movement: when a character leaves the known, they finally meet themselves. I always have a road map of North India in my luggage, and my films are often born from a journey. Roads and trains return in my work like an obsession, because it's by moving forward that you shed yourself. You who compose while traveling, A.R., know that immobility kills inspiration far more surely than fatigue.
When a character leaves the known, they finally meet themselves.
—You go on solo location scouts, camera in hand, to remote regions. Does this solitude on the roads nourish your inner music?
Absolutely, and that may be what we share most deeply. When I go alone with my small camera, to a village in Rajasthan or a forgotten station in Himachal Pradesh, I'm not looking for frames: I'm looking for faces, lights, silences. That's where the melodies you've given me take on their full meaning, because I listen to them facing the real landscape. The solitude of travel opens a space that the city immediately closes. I photograph a late-afternoon light and suddenly an entire scene appears to me. It's not technical scouting, it's listening. I believe that deep India speaks in a low voice, and you must move away from the multiplexes to hear it. Every film begins for me with this solitary walk, map in hand, even before the first word of the script.
Deep India speaks in a low voice; you must move away from the multiplexes to hear it.
—You often say you want to show the India beyond shopping malls. Since the liberalization of 1991, what have we lost by filming only the city?
We've lost the real country. Since 1991, India has opened up, an urban middle class has emerged, multiplexes have sprung up everywhere, and cinema has started speaking only to that audience — educated, English-speaking, eager to consume. Yet there is an India that lives beyond the malls and multiplexes, and that's the one I want to film. When Slumdog Millionaire triumphed, the world discovered our slums through a foreign gaze; I want to show our roads, our villages, our stations, from an insider's perspective. Globalization pushes us to look like everyone else. I resist by taking my camera where concrete hasn't arrived. Filming deep India isn't folklore: it's refusing to let my country be reduced to its urban shop window.
There is an India that lives beyond the malls and multiplexes, and that's the one I film.
—Your films travel as far as Prague, seduce the diaspora, embrace globalization. Isn't that contradictory with this desire for an authentic India?
It's a tension I embrace rather than a contradiction. Yes, I've shot in Prague, yes the diaspora loves my films, yes I am a child of that cultural globalization that has transformed Bollywood since the 2000s. But opening up to the world doesn't mean dissolving into it. I can place my camera on a European platform and remain deeply Indian in my gaze, my music, my way of telling love stories. The real risk is homogenization: that our films end up looking like rootless products. So I make the two Indias dialogue — the one that dreams of Europe and the one of country roads. Sufi music and Urdu poetry anchor me, wherever I shoot. One can be a bridge between India and the world without renouncing the ground from which one speaks.
Opening up to the world doesn't mean dissolving into it.
—Your films are said to be romantic, but you claim they are about something else. What are these lovers you stage really looking for?
I don't believe my love stories are about two people falling in love. They are about two people finding themselves; romance is just the vehicle. Look at Jab We Met: Geet doesn't just save that depressed man, she returns him to himself, and he reveals her to herself when everything collapses. In Tamasha, my character represses his true nature to conform to family expectations, and it is love that cracks that mask. The other is a mirror: we love the one who finally makes us sincere. That's why my endings are never simple happy marriages — what interests me is the moment when the character stops lying about who they are. The romantic quest and the identity quest, for me, are one and the same road.
My stories aren't about people falling in love, but about people finding themselves.
—Tamasha seems like your most intimate film. Did you put something of yourself into it that you wouldn't dare say except through fiction?
Probably more than in any other, and to you I can admit it, A.R. That man who plays a role to please his family, who stifles the artist within to fit the mold — I know him from the inside. We all grow up learning to repress our true nature under social pressure, and one day we must choose between the comfort of the mask and the painful truth of self. Tamasha was born from that fear: of living a life that isn't mine. Fiction allows me to say this without impropriety, by lending it to a character. And your music, again, carried what words could not. Filming, for me, is that form of indirect confession — I tell myself while believing I tell others, and that may be the only sincerity I am capable of.
I tell myself while believing I tell others.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Imtiaz Ali's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.