Arundhati Roy talks movies: ‘Every person who reads my book has their own film in their head’

“Cinematic”. The adjective is unfailingly, unsurprisingly, deployed frequently to describe Arundhati Roy’s writing. In her essays, novels and memoir, the sentences sigh, laugh and cry, like living creatures. The words assume shape and form, yielding visuals that are often breath-taking. The page becomes a screen held in the palm of the hand.

“The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a hat…The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives.” (The God of Small Things.) “I could see little children with littler goats scuttling across the landscape like motorized peanuts.” (The Greater Common Good.) “The mother of the birthday child was plump and safe-looking. Her brilliant diamond earrings were like tiny searchlights.” (Mother Mary Comes To Me.)

Before Roy became a professional writer, she was another kind of writer – of screenplays. In 1989, she wrote her first movie for director Pradip Krishen, the delightful comedy In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones. Annie explored with never-before-seen, rarely-since-seen candour and hilarity the experiences of students at an architecture college in Delhi in 1974. Roy had studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture herself in the late 1970s.

Before Annie, Roy had acted alongside Raghuvir Yadav in Krishen’s first feature, the colonial-era drama Massey Sahib from 1985. After Massey Sahib, Krishen and Roy embarked on a television show called Bargad, following the journeys of four college friends between 1921 and 1947.

But Bargad was scrapped when the producer ran out of money. It was “like being shot in the knees while we were running the final lap of a marathon”, Roy writes in her recent memoirMother Mary Comes To Me.

Roy and Krishen rebounded gloriously with Annie. The camaraderie coursing through hostel rooms and classrooms; the irreverence for authority; the Hindi-inflected English dialogue; the authentic character types, the cheerfully anarchic production design (also by Roy) – Annie is revered by generations of viewers despite being screened just once in a late-night slot on Doordarshan.

The cast includes Arjun Raina as Anand, or “Annie”, who has a hare-brained scheme to make productive use of human refuse dumped on railway tracks. Roy plays Radha, a rebellious and politically inclined fashion-forward student.

Annie was recently restored by Film Heritage Foundation, and will be shown at the Berlin International Film Festival (February 12-22). Krishen and Roy are scheduled to attend the screening.

Both of them have since moved on from filmmaking. Pradip Krishen is a reputed environmentalist, publishing Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide in 2006.

After Annie, Roy wrote Krishen’s Electric Moon, followed by a screenplay that did not get made. She did not enjoy the Electric Moon experience, she writes in Mother Mary Comes To Me: “I longed to work alone. To be in complete control of my writing.” That quest led to the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, about the twins Estha and Rahel in Kerala’s Ayemenem village.

Roy’s latest book is an unflinchingly honest portrait of her relationship with her mother, the educationist Mary Roy, as well as a partial memoir of Roy’s own journey. Mother Mary Comes To Me includes Roy’s memories of watching movies as a child with her mother’s employer Kurussammal as well as the making of Massey Sahib, Bargad, Annie and Electric Moon. The writing is dazzling, deeply felt – and cinematic.

On a recent afternoon in Delhi, Roy spoke to Scroll about how cinema’s loss has been literature’s gain. Her home has densely packed bookshelves, two adorable dogs and film posters for Pierre Etaix’s Yoyo, Vijay Anand’s Jewel Thief and, of course, her collaborations with Krishen.

In the interview, the 64-year-old writer pointed out that movie theatres turn up in several of her works. The God of Small Things has a chapter dedicated to frequent viewings of The Sound of Music at Abhilash Talkies. In her second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Shiraz Cinema in Kashmir has been repurposed as a centre for brutal interrogations (“What had once been the cinema snack bar now functioned as a reception-cum-registration counter for torturers and torturees.”)

Neither of Roy’s highly visual novels has been adapted for screen. Here’s why.

What are some of your earliest cinematic memories?

All of us probably grow up in the audio track of cinema even if we don’t see them. Growing up in a village or a little town, you hear snatches of film songs used for announcements and various other things.

I used to see movies in the theatre with Kurussammal, Malayalam and Tamil films like Kumara Sambhavam and movies starring MGR and Jayalalithaa. I had a scattered knowledge of Tamil film cabaret songs.

Even before that, my brother and I used to be told, if you sleep in the afternoon, you can watch a show at night. We would get all excited. After 15 minutes, Mrs [Mary] Roy would say, this is such rubbish, let’s leave. But we were longing to stay.

So some of my earliest memories are of longing to keep sitting in the cinema and being dragged out because she had decided that it was shit. She didn’t have a love for movies. She was more into literature.

The chapter ‘Abhilash Talkies’ in The God of Small Things refers to repeated viewings of The Sound of Music. Did that happen to you as well?

Yes, yes – we even went all the way to Kochi to see it.

Actually, in both God and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, weird things happen in cinema halls. A very strange thread of cinema runs through – it doesn’t necessarily have to do with being a film buff.

What was happening on the screen was only one part of it. I was more interested in what was going on in the periphery, whether it was Kurussammal or kids peeing in the aisle or peanut being sold or rockets being thrown up. There is so much else building itself, which is very much part of one’s experience of watching and thinking of what goes on.

When I was at the School of Planning and Architecture, one of my projects was designing a movie theatre. Annie too has the Ugandan student Kasozi, who designs a cinema hall. The principal Yamdoot makes fun of him, saying that when people go to watch a movie, do they go to watch a performance or do a performance? So, the way in which that film auditorium is designed, the circulation, the lobby, the structure, all that was wired into me as well.

Is it fair to say that you accidentally strayed into cinema?

Yes. As a person who always wanted to be a writer, I wanted to work with what I knew, not something research-based, although Bargad was entirely that.

Had Bargad been completed, would you have written more films or shows, perhaps?

It was a horrible experience to put in all that work into Bargad and see it being derailed. The script is preserved somewhere. It’s a cliche, but it was for the best, I think.

If Bargad had taken off, Annie may never have happened. Who knows?

Annie has a double flashback narrative. The film was written in 1989, but is set in 1974.

It’s actually a triple flashback. I am talking about people who might have joined in 1969. I knew people from the school of architecture who were from that time.

By the time I joined in 1976, it had already started becoming slightly less interesting. There were very few of us who were still that 1960s throwback. There was a fair amount of ambition.

People were frightened of me in my class because I had no home and I had no fear. I had no one to answer to. There was a kind of bolshiness with the professors. It was slightly already going off. That’s why I thought, let me pull it back a little bit.

How did you approach the screenplay for Annie?

I didn’t know much about anything. I was just doing my thing. I honestly don’t think that the script came out of a fine education in cinema. It came from an organically lived thing through Massey Sahib and Bargad.

We were literally pulling back and saying, let’s do something small and controlled, on the edge of the margins of the margins of the margins. I had an almost apologetic feeling about the fact that the film wasn’t dealing with the really big swirling winds and issues in the country, which parallel cinema was trying to do.

This film was the opposite of being ambitious, of thinking that you are going to be some great thing.

One of the main things was language – the texture of language. There was the feeling that you were watching films and reading but seeing yourself nowhere – not in the women or the men or the young.

The film doesn’t have a made-up language, but a real language. It was what we spoke. It wasn’t a mocking of Indian English. It was a celebration of the way young students in universities were. All of us were from all over the place. It’s not like all of us spoke Hindi either.

How do you look back on Annie?

There’s a sort of radical freedom in Annie. It’s not that you’re free to be a brat. It's not that kind of freedom. It’s a freedom from ambition, but not a freedom from concern. It’s not even like there was a student rebellion going on – it was just about breathing easy.

In that time, anybody who was trying to boast about the fact that they had better clothes or more money would be ridiculed. That’s the opposite of what it is now. It’s about the freedom from exactly what Facebook and Insta and all make people do, which is to inflate themselves and boast and keep on promoting themselves. This is complete freedom from that, to almost the opposite thing. The more ragged and the less glossy you are, the better.

The best thing about Annie was that it wasn’t ambitious. It’s not a film about thinking big thoughts. The film has these people who are the opposite of the oxygenating heroes of today. These people are always so much more interesting.

What were we even thinking? I looked at some stills again recently and said, look how ridiculous I look in Massey Sahib. I had fake plastic teeth that were sticking out like a rabbit. There wasn’t even a pretence of a make-up artist.

Apart from acting in Annie, you are also the production designer. What went into the film’s distinctively scrappy look?

We shot at the actual School of Planning and Architecture during the vacation. Designing it was a great pleasure, although we had no money. Everything was scrounged. It was a film made on the budget that the characters were meant to have. There’s an integrity to that, which I really like.

The film isn’t glossy, it still looks patched together. It’s patchy and scrappy and all the rest of it. I wrote the titles and made the sketches, all the things on the walls, the posters, the graffiti in the men’s toilets. The design was so easy for me because it was everything that I knew. I could close my eyes and do it.

I remember the corridor that leads the studio, which has ants painted on the stairs. I had instructed the people who were doing the drawing to write “Ho”, and they turned it to “Ho, ho, ho.” They didn't understand that Ho was Ho Chi Minh.

You acted in two films, you wrote a few scripts. Why didn’t you continue in the medium?

Cinema is a brilliant art form. You can do a lot with it. But for me, first of all, cinema is so much a team effort.

Annie wasn’t just me and Pradip, it was all of us. By the time we made Electric Moon, it was a terrible experience. I also realised that the common ground between me and Pradip had been used up.

I needed to write The God of Small Things. That too was totally experimental. That too wasn’t coming out of some great study of literature or applied scholarship.

Studying architecture, making movies, writing The God, doing the political essays, writing The Ministry, writing Mother Mary – in some ways, some people see it as, you did this and you gave up that. I see it as a continuous search for what is the best way to say what you want to say.

When you are experimenting artistically, you want to feel that you are in control. Just from Annie to Electric Moon, when the budget did go up a little, I felt that it made the whole experience more miserable. Because you lost your freedom in some way. If you were going make an even bigger film, you were going to lose it even more.

I’m an extremely politically aware person. The essay is directly sort of addressing that, there’s no pussyfooting around in those. In the fiction, there’re other ways.

So for me, it’s a constant search for how to say what I want to say best, be it through design or production design. In terms of writing, I feel like I have complete control, and that money doesn’t intrude before the work is done. Whereas in cinema, it’s not because the medium is less or more, but because it involves a different set of skills – raising money, being answerable to the people who gave you money, being answerable to the actors. I am not made of that stuff.

How do you react when people tell you that your writing is extremely cinematic?

I know that it is. I think that every person who reads my books has their own film in their head. So I don’t want it to be just one film that somebody made. I like the fact that everyone has their own little private cinema going on in their heads. That leaves it open for me – and it’s great. Why should I colonise those millions of imaginations with one film?

It’s cinematic in a way that is absolutely in your imagination, not cinematic in a way that oh, we can make a film about this. So many things and so many feelings are almost palpable. You can almost touch it. But if you try and make a film out of it…

What I love about any art form is that it should be itself. I don’t want a book to be written so that it can be made into a movie. A novel is doing everything that a novel and only a novel can do. An essay is doing everything that only an essay can do. A film doing what only a film can do. It’s about sort of probing the boundaries of whatever the art form you are working in is the true pleasure of it. Why should you turn this into that?

Did you get offers for a screen adaptation of The God of Small Things? There is apparently an unauthorised Pakistani show based on the book.

There were offers, many offers. But I said no. I haven’t seen the Pakistani show, but many people have told me about it.

I need this freedom deeply. That for me is the fun of life. That is a greater wealth than anything else – not being owned, not being told what to do, not being in competition with anything. Just being free to experiment. And to me, everything I do is an experiment informed by everything else that I do.

My architecture training helped me in the production design for Annie and Electric Moon. Everything helps. My writing of screenplays helps the dialogue in novels. My study of city planning helps my political understanding. Everything is one big piece of work really in the end – the cinema, the literature, the design, the politics, the memoir, everything.

What is most beautiful is that everyone has that film in their head. That is so much part of my politics – that everyone has it, everyone owns it. It’s theirs.

When I write, I hear it – it’s an audio track. It’s also a visual thing but it’s 100% an audio track. I was asked to read the book, so I went to a studio in London. I read it in little more than half the time they normally keep for something like this. It was easy for me because it was there in my mind.

I love the act of writing also because I am trained to draw and write. I told myself that I was going to write Mother Mary entirely by hand. I wrote about seven sentences and then switched to the computer.

Everything is a part of what I do. There’s a line in Mother Mary about writing a stubbornly visual but unfilmable book. I don't think anything is unfilmable. But that can’t be your goal.

I have an arrogance about language. For example, people ask me about why there are no photos in Mother Mary. Everything is evoked in the language.

Do you regularly watch films, especially to keep track of the new releases?

I do, sometimes. I used to seek out films just to know what’s going on. Now I feel that it’s like eating oily food just to know what it tastes like. It’s almost as bad for you. There’s something so subversive about how such films can get inside you. I can’t do it anymore.

A friend shared a video in which someone is talking about Mother Mary Comes to Me and says, she would like to play me. I told my friend that the only person I’ll allow to play me is Matt Damon. Because I want to be like that – just land up in places like Jason Bourne without passports and know the way everywhere.

Also read:

‘Mother Mary Comes To Me’: Arundhati Roy writes intimately of life with, and without, her mother

‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’ by Arundhati Roy and Pradip Krishen is a chilled blast from a more tolerant past