Tuesday Jul 02, 2024
Tuesday Jul 02, 2024
Saturday, 23 November 2013 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
You couldn’t call Prasad Pereira an independent film professional only. He’s had his run-in with almost every part of the creative arts. Be it reading news and playing music on radio, theatre, writing documentary and feature film scripts or working behind the scenes making both local and foreign films, he’s had his hand in all of it.
I met Prasad in the midst of Colombo’s busy post-CHOGM recovery on an afternoon sitting in the shade of the Barefoot Cafe to pick his mind and see what makes him tick.
Childhood and family
Usually my first question when I meet individuals involved in the creative arts is what their childhoods were about. This question more often than not gives one some insight into what motivated these people to become what they are. With Prasad Pereira however, he didn’t give me much to work with.
“I grew up in a very stable home I think and my parents were both employees of the Peradeniya University. I have a brother and a sister, and we grew up in a lower middle class setting. We were not affluent by any means but I think we were quite okay.
“I mean every family has their problems but I think I had a very happy childhood and nothing truly eventful happened by then. I went to Trinity College and was a pretty much average student and in your childhood, if you had no big problems, it is pretty much paradise.
“I’m a very chilled out, laidback guy and I think that comes from the fact that I had an easy life as a kid. I never worried about things. I guess my emotional make up is such that I don’t really worry about things that much. I do have anxieties and everybody has anxieties and concerns but I’ve learnt to take a day at a time. But from my childhood, my biggest influence was that it was a pretty happy stable place and that has kind of bled into my life now.”
Cinema his first love
From the time he can remember, cinema has always been his first love, he says and he’s always wanted to find a way into it one way or the other. He found himself uninterested in settling in to anything like a banking or corporate job. “I was never interested in doing something like that. My first job was at Yes FM.”
Movies fascinated him he explained, due to their ability to tell stories and the visual glory of it all. “I guess I was always fascinated by images that move and it’s a bit of a difficult thing to say really because I don’t have any memories of not liking them. My father took me for my first movie when I was five or six and ever since then I was pretty hooked. I liked the way movies told stories. I like reading as well but somehow movies trumped them. That’s pretty much why.”
First job
His first job was at Yes FM as a news reader at which he “stuck around” for eight years and proceeded to become an editor and program producer but by then he had already felt the pull towards a more visual form of expression.
“I did a voice test and based on that they hired me when I was 20 and I stuck there for eight years. I personally think I stagnated there as well for a while before actually making the decision to move out.
“How hard was it getting into the industry? Thankfully I was blessed with a certain amount of luck as well I guess but for the first year after radio I knocked about a bit, I did a bit of writing and I was just trying to figure myself out. Then quite fortunately I happened to meet Surein De Silva of Video Image, who still to this day, remains a good friend and whom I consider a great friend and mentor.”
De Silva he says was the person who suggested that that he gets into writing documentaries. “He called me one day and said he wanted me to be an assistant director for him. At first I said I don’t really know the job but he said that I could learn on the job. I spent the next five years there.”
Prasad’s first foray into film saw him cut his teeth on commercials and the difference he says between commercials and feature films lie mainly in their individual scales.
“Being around a film set is the same for a 30 second commercial or a feature film. My first film was ‘Machang’ and I have to say that it was a great film to start on. The first thing you notice in a commercial is that you have two or three days’ work, maximum five days to a week at most, and then you’re done. But a film is a bigger discipline where you have to get ready to work for three to four months and your schedule is protracted and instead of shooting scenes that are really short as in commercials, you shoot scenes that go on for days. It’s just a protracted schedule and instead of telling a short story you tell a story in two or three hours. Frankly I enjoy the discipline of feature length films.”
Films
He says that he happened to be fortunate enough to get opportunities working with a lot of foreign crews in Sri Lanka with his pride and joy being Assistant Director on Oscar Nominated Director Deepa Mehta’s ‘Midnight’s Children’.
“I worked as an Assistant Director on that in 2011; actually before that was ‘Machang’ and a German film called ‘Emden Men,’ but ‘Midnight’s Children’ was the best. ‘Midnight’s Children’ was a long haul project and I got involved in it because we were doing ‘Emden Men’. I got involved in it only for principal photography. Yeah it was great because they had big scenes that involved helicopters and machines of war and huge crowds and I guess being on a set like that and to see how large scale film making works was a great experience and to see how the logistics of mounting a project like that is much bigger than any commercial I could think of.”
Since then he’s worked on another feature film called ‘Vara: A blessing’ directed by Bhutanese lama Khyentse Norbu, which addressed class tensions in rural India that takes the shape of a simple love story.
“It brought together a very small but really nice crew and it was interesting in the sense that it was almost an antithesis of ‘Midnight’s Children’ because that was a huge project with hundreds involved and this was the complete opposite in that sense. It was shot for six weeks and then we spent another six weeks in pre-production.”
Since then Prasad has been concentrating mainly on commercials and his aspirations lie mainly in writing and directing his own scripts. “I know I should have gotten into it before but I’ve always been a late bloomer and this is the right time for me I think.”
Sri Lanka’s environment for new ideas
“I think Sri Lanka does have an environment for new ideas, but of course with the current climate there is a huge, you know, nationalist sentiment going around and a certain self-censorship being used. So within the paradigms of that, I think a film maker or a story teller can be innovative enough to make challenging stories but I guess you have to be careful as you do want to be around to make the next film and the next one after that. There are certain limitations, but I think you have to be able to work within that paradigm, which the current film makers are doing.”
Breaking into the industry
For a newcomer with no experience, breaking into the Sri Lankan film industry can be quite a challenge but Prasad’s come through the ranks with, as he said, a little bit of luck and hard work.
“I guess it is quite tough. It’s not one of those industries where you just walk in; you have to work your way from the bottom. There are people who have managed to make contacts and somehow find their way through. It’s not as hard as Hollywood or in the UK, in the Western film making world it is much more difficult and here, I think it’s relatively easier because the industry is smaller and so there are fewer people to contend with. For someone who’s just come out of film school, he has to start at the bottom.”
Amateur film in Sri Lanka
“I don’t see a lot of new films coming out because the population is that much smaller, unlike in India or in America or anywhere else but I think that there is a new generation of young people who are fortunate enough to have parents who can afford to send them to film school abroad and there are people who are coming back to Sri Lanka to make movies.
“So there is an interesting new trend happening now and we will see the results in a few years when they make making features properly and the technical discipline that comes from properly studying the subject. Also there are interesting local voices who start working at the bottom and work their ways up and through sheer perseverance get to the top. So I guess there are two sides to the story.”
Greatest influences
“My greatest influences I would say, even though I couldn’t understand them properly at the time, are Martin Scorsese’s early films like ‘Taxi Driver,’ which is the first important film I saw. That movie was gifted to me by a family friend and I watched it when I was 15. That was the film that showed me what cinema can be like.
“In addition Oliver Stone’s ‘Platoon’ and ‘JFK’ were great influences and believe it or not Kevin Costner’s ‘Dances with Wolves,’ but I think someone who really changed the game was Quentin Tarantino. I was 16 when ‘Reservoir Dogs’ came out and that made me think ‘what the hell is this?’ and it was thrilling the way he used dialogue and drama. I guess that in a way kind of took me in a different direction and I discovered independent American movies which could be very interesting with actual people as characters and people we can relate to.
“I love Westerns too and also grew up with the usual Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies as well. So it’s a big mix of action thrillers and drama, etc.”
His type of films
A question that I have been itching to ask Prasad was on the subject of Sri Lanka’s readiness to accept radical and freethinking films in the mainstream and whether he sees himself taking on subjects such as that.
“Are these the type of movies I would like to make? Well, not really free thinking and radical but I would say something more independent with intriguing strange characters who talk a lot. I’ve just written a couple of shorts and it’s taken me a long time to finish because as a writer the biggest thing is falling into a routine if you’re writing something of length, falling into a routine and making the story come to you. Unfortunately for me I don’t have the luxury of settling into something like that. I still have to put food on the table and pay bills, etc. So I had to take a little time and work in pockets. But finally my screenplay is done and I would like to take steps slowly. I think there is a still a way to go and things are looking positive.”
Pix by Lasantha Kumara
