During the Q&A session on Jai Ho , a film on music director A. R. Rahman, at the Stein Auditorium of India Habitat Centre earlier this week, a quiet man could be seen signing autographs and posing for selfies.
Not many realised who he was till Rahman called Resul Pookutty’s name from the stage. Pookutty won an Oscar for sound mixing in Slumdog Millionaire . Rahman bagged one too for original score.
The sound designer, who keeps a low profile, has worked on many films including Ghajini , Black , Saawariya, Gandhi, My Father, Highway , Yaan (Tamil), Aankhon Dekhi and Unfreedom . Two other films — Margarita With A Straw and Nanak Shah Fakir — will release soon.
Post Slumdog Millionaire in 2009, Pookutty faced what he called the “Oscar curse”. Incidentally, his first film as a sound designer, Pazhassi Raja , was released after he won the Oscar. He won a National Award for the film.
“Most of my Academy Award winning friends tell me they all faced the Oscar ‘curse’. It means no work from small producers and directors because they think we have become too big to work with them and they can’t afford us anymore. Big producers don’t approach us unless they are sure their product is worthy of an Oscar. So you end up sitting at home. I also faced such times, but thankfully they are over now.”
Pookutty was also out of work because people thought he lived in Chennai like Rahman. “I am Bombay boy. I have been living here since the past two decades. Many people thought I live in Chennai and it cost me work.”
Without mincing words, he says he would have been doing different kinds of work if he had been living outside India. In India, producers and directors still don’t understand the true worth of sound design.
“Only a person who knows the art of sound understands the true worth of sound design. Though awareness about sound design has improved in the industry, producer and directors still don’t want to invest money in it. Music sells, sound design does not. They don’t understand that like a camera provides visual appeal to a film, sound design gives it texture. It is completely different from music. Music is one sound, while sound design has millions of sounds. Recently, for instance, millions of sound designs were used in PK and Robot .”
Much like his speciality, Pookutty is way ahead of his times. After school, Pookutty made a sound library of his own. In doing so, he became the first sound designer in the country to record several kinds of sound and come out with an album, titled Essential Indian Sound Effects , in 1997.
“Now I have one of India’s most comprehensive sound libraries. I still go to record innovative sounds when I work on a new film. But people in the industry are lethargic. For the sake of convenience, they use sounds available online. I don’t want to add to people’s convenience anymore. I am also tired of listening to my own sound design in various products used by several people. This is also a reason that the sound designing hasn’t come up faster.”
He is also upset that Unfreedom , a bilingual film he has worked on, has been banned in India. Shifting between New York and New Delhi, the film juxtaposes two unflinching stories about religious fundamentalism and intolerance. Talking about the ban, the artiste says: “The censor board is only a certification authority and not a controlling body. By banning a film, a creator is indirectly dictated what to create and what not to create.”
He is finding solace in current projects including Muzaffar Ali’s period drama Jaanisaar and Hollywood movie Promsie Dad .