Originally Posted by BR
There’s something Quentin Tarantino told Entertainment Weekly magazine about Martin Scorsese. “If I say [his] movies are getting kind of geriatric and everything, he can say, ‘F— you, man! I’m doing what I want to do, I’m following my muse,’ and he’s 100 per cent right. I’m in my church praying to my god and he’s in his church praying to his. There was a time we were in the same church, and I miss that.” That’s regrettably how I feel about much of Ilayaraja’s music today, and I think I speak for a fair number of his fans who worshipped the great man in the 1970s through the early 1990s. The congregation has shrunk to a cult, with only a handful of dogged devotees still keeping the faith. So when I heard that Gautham Vasudev Menon was working with him, I sat up. This is easily the most interesting development in Tamil film music in a while, for we usually hear of directors moving on to newer composers – the way many filmmakers, even the old-faithfuls like Bharathiraja, left Ilayaraja behind and latched on to younger talents – but we rarely, if ever, hear of someone setting course in the opposite direction, a today’s-generation filmmaker seeking out a senior composer. It’s like Mani Ratnam choosing to work with MS Viswanathan on Agni Natchatiram, for instance, and my interest in meeting Menon was to investigate both the reason for this collaboration and the ensuing process. The complete transcript follows.
