Ram Madhvani

Acclaimed for its pacy feel and mesmerising production design, the Happydent gum ad by director Ram Madhvani has real creative teeth. Belinda Archer chews things over with the Mumbai-based visual wizard

"I like it when I surprise people with my work. I used to be very sensitive when people asked, 'Oh you did that?' Now I like that. It means that they keep writing me off and I keep coming back. I now realise it is better to be a mongrel than an Alsatian - people don't have expectations from mongrels." "Cinema is my first love. Advertising is my mistress. I wanted to direct films from the age of 16, but my family, did not want me to get into the big, bad world of cinema. So I did many things, including selling milk and furniture and generally being a nice, sweet Gujarati boy."
Such humble words come from the mouth of Ram Madhvani, the Mumbai-based Indian director of one of shots' favourite films of the past 12 months, the gorgeous Happydent White chewing gum commercial which has already cleaned up at the Asia Pacific awards, landing prizes for Best Director, Best Film and Best Production Design. The ad, in fact, is one of his first to cut through on an international level. Madhvani has been making commercials in his native country for over 15 years but it is this fabulous piece of film-making that has propelled him onto a broader stage, exhibiting as it does a wonderfully fantastical cinematic eye.
His pride for the spot is evident. "I am told that the client is now installing a new factory," he grins, swiftly crediting all the other brains behind the work, including the McCann Erickson creative in Delhi, Prasoon Joshi, the client, Sameer Suneja, and his producer Manoj Shroff for their "courage and faith".

Despite his strong advertising pedigree, Madhvani says it was cinema that first got him into film-making - at an early age when he was growing up in a small village called Barsi, eight hours from Bombay, where his family had a textile factory and sugar mill.

"Cinema is my first love. Advertising is my mistress," he says. "I wanted to direct films from the age of 16, but my family, who were originally from Gujarat and then Africa, did not want me to get into the big, bad world of cinema. So I did many things, including selling milk and furniture and generally being a nice, sweet Gujarati boy."

He was sent to a very British-style boarding school called St Peters in Panchgani, a small hill station in the state of Maharashtra. Then, crucially, he began to learn about photography from his middle brother, Nrupen, "an excellent and meticulous photographer". But it was his eldest brother, Yogesh, who gave him the leg-up into the world that was to become his life. "I have chosen not to do any international ads. Yet. Perhaps, post Happydent White, the quality of scripts that come my way from outside India will improve. I try to see how to make my ads Indian yet international at the same time."
"I was working in the diamond business with Yogesh in New York, and he made a really encouraging offer, to pay for my evening classes at the NYU film school, which I accepted." His family having finally realised and accepted how passionate he was about film-making, Madhvani then returned to Bombay - a key move, that he felt was necessary for his work.

"I just felt that film-makers should make films about where they belong, from where they belong," he says. Another key move was signing, right at the start of his career, to Equinox Films, one of India's leading production houses and a company that continues to represent him to this day.

"Most of what I know in advertising and cinema and life, I owe to Sumantra Ghosal, my boss at Equinox. He is my guru and friend. Two years after joining the company I decided to go to the Film Institute of India. I sat the entrance exam, passed, and was meant to go for the admission interview. But the night before, Sumantra offered me a partnership. His logic for me not to go was that a director needs to learn not just from cinema but from the arts and from life," recalls Madhvani.

To date, his commercials output has been almost exclusively for the Indian market - work that has included spots for adidas, Cadbury, Premsons Bazar and Coca-Cola India, as well as the Organ Donation spot for Forte India which landed a bronze Lion at Cannes in 2000. But Madhvani thinks, even hopes, that this might change in the wake of his Happydent work. While he originally felt film-makers should only make films about where they belong, he now points to such great Indian directors as Shekar Kapoor, Gurinder Chadda and Mira Nair, who have all moved successfully beyond their home territory.

"I have chosen not to do any international ads. Yet. Perhaps, post Happydent White, the quality of scripts that come my way from outside India will improve. I try to see how to make my ads Indian yet international at the same time. I am a mix of Indian and western - that's what I am. I tend to use a term called 'exotic-ethnic'. In fact, I like this hyphenated view of life. I think I am humbly-arrogant, pessimistically-optimistic, classically-modern. I hope my ads have technique with soul, form with function."

Much of Madhvani's commercials work displays something he has come to term as "visual language" - an emphasis on the look, the styling of the film. Several years ago he tried to convert all the commercials he made, using relevant technique to enhance concept, and crafting the film via all the devices of pure cinema rather than through the actor alone. "I did not use actors in anything more than an elementary way."

Later, however, that changed. In 2002 he made his first feature, Let's Talk, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and won Best Debut Director at the Srinivas Gollapudi National Awards. This was shot on digital and was made with a crew of just 10, including the actors. Post Let's Talk, he believes he has reached maturity with his film-making and has arrived at a balance. "I do what is right by the script," he says, looking at "the human being" more, rather than shoehorning his visual language approach into everything he shoots.

So what next? True to his original love for cinema, Madhvani is currently working on a second feature, called Talisman, based on a classic Hindi story from a book called Chandrakanta written at the end of the 19th century. It promises to blend spectacular special effects with an emotional narrative.

"It is a fantasy novel and it was so popular when it was first published that people stood in queues the whole night to buy it. The film is a fantasy/action/adventure/love story. I like the control of shooting against croma, so this will be a post-heavy film," he says.

Interestingly, Madhvani reveals that the biggest influence in his feature film-making has been the somewhat quirky, realist British director Mike Leigh.

"I am told that there are two kinds of directors in the world. The Humanist (directors like Satyajit Ray and Mike Leigh) or the Poetist (directors like Andrei Takovsky or Fellini). I lead a hyphenated life and I would like to be a hyphen film-maker. Some day I hope to become a Humanist-Poetist," he adds, with a twinkle.
But advertising will remain an ongoing passion, insists this immensely talented film-maker, despite his features work.

"Advertising has given me everything. My wife, my home, my livelihood, my guru, my friends, my craft and my discipline. It has given me what we all seek in life, a sense of belonging. I will not leave advertising - I will continue to pursue it alongside features, and I believe my work with both will benefit from one another," he says, adding that there is a particular image we should look out for in any of his future work.

"One of my memories of my father is that he wanted to make a swimming pool in the shape of India in the garden. Some day I will use this image in a film," he says.