PROFILE: Cinematographer Manoj Lobo

REAL CAN BE BEAUTIFUL

One of the hallmarks of Abbas Tyrewala’s directorial debut Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na was the believability of its characters and situations. The Arabian Sea shot across from the Bandra reclamation was just like it is in real life, a dark moody colour. The skies weren’t a saturated blue. Poetry was made out of cement mixers (which were likened to snoring ogres). There WAS a pretty cast, but not a designer one, like in recent films like Aisha. “Of course, at the beginning some of the actors did have a problem with them not looking glamorous because they want that,” says Manoj Lobo, director of photography of the film, and of Mr Tyrewala’s next, Jhootha Hi Sahi, currently in theatres. The brief he had received from his director was to keep things real. This sat pretty with his own sensibilities, “The only thing I told Abbas at that time was that real could be beautiful without being cosmetic.”

Mr Lobo’s other work has been in the amped-up world of ad films and music videos. Jaane Tu.. isn’t considered a cinematographer’s film, although the way it is shot is very important when creating the emotional graph that resonates with its audience. That is no mean feat and for many technicians, this ability to ‘hide’, or not be ‘visible’ in the texture of the film, is something to aspire towards. Many editors are wont to add flashy transitions, or unnecessary jump cuts. Cinematographers long for the pièce de résistance 'perfect sunset' moment—subtlety is not their métier. Sometimes though, the story is aided by an ability to camouflage your work, to not show off. Mr Lobo does this remarkably well. He may have cut his teeth in the world of advertising, with its penchant for split-second emotions and VFX laden hard sells, but when he makes the transition to film, he puts on a different hat. As he explains, ‟In a feature, you need to know that a shot serves a purpose in the entire sequence, you cannot just get caught up with the shot like in an ad; and that approach has become intuitive for me. Sometime, when I get into an ad right away, I notice that my pans are a little slower, my tracks are slower, the shots are more soothing. However, the language is getting closer and closer. If you see how ad films are influencing feature films these days, it’s quite amazing. Because earlier it was the other way round.”

The exchange of talent between the ad and film worlds has been phenomenal. Films like Sapnay from an ad film-maker Rajeev Menon played out like a series of short emotional bursts stitched together, and not even in a seamless fashion. Therefore Mr Lobo’s ability to pause and contemplate the grammar of cinema serves his work well. It isn’t as if he is averse to glossy, epic, block-buster cinema. Those productions still involve a high level of technical finesse, even if the aesthetics are a departure from his natural sensibilities. He says,“I do have my politics. I think the politics should stay for your writing, your film-making. It should not be there in your cinematography. I mean, it should be there in your approach to cinematography WITHIN a film, not as some kind of blanket. After all I’m taking up a film to support the director’s vision. This is what I understand of film-making, and if I want to stamp my own view, then I’ll make the film myself.”

In the west the roles of the cameraperson and the director of photography are clearly delineated, “As a DOP there, you don’t have to handle the cameras, so you are free to think about the larger perspective of the film.” Mr Lobo finds that he enjoys operating the camera more than just being a proxy force who has decided the look of the film. The camera, the framing, the lighting, these are the elements of his personal fiefdom,“Operating the camera is a very beautiful part of cinematography and you really are closest to the film.” In India, it is expected of the director of photography to handle even the operational aspects of shooting the film, and he relishes this,“It’s very subtle how people frame, how they operate and move the camera. And it is very different from my sensibility however tuned you are with the details. I prefer doing it myself.”

While there is still talk on the ground of this being an insular, clique-ridden industry, talent is always being scouted. While doing style promos for MTV, fresh out of the Pune Institute in 2004, Mr Lobo had already attracted attention for his work. His diploma film, Girni, had won him a National Award for its cinematography, and been received favorably in festivals around the world. Ads were a natural progression, and after Jaane Tu.., the world has been his oyster, in quite literal ways as well. While he subscribes to the George Lucas view that if you can imagine something, it can happen; and is very much at home with green rooms and wire-work and digital hi-jinks, sometimes his work throws him into the midst of a more guerilla kind of film-making as he discovered during a shoot in South Africa for an Orange commercial. There was a spectacular aerial shot of a kite. He recounts,“Well, I had to take those helicopter shots. Normally either you have a giro-head or a remote head to take those shots… and they said we don’t have those, but we’ll give you something that works just as well. And they gave me a car tube with two planks of plywood that were tied together and they said this was what you have to use. I was thinking are they were giving a drowning man something or is this really going to work?” The shots turned out to be absolutely stable.

Like that shoot, which had an international team from Kenya, his new film Jhootha Ji Sahi also has a very interesting global crew, including its production designer, David Bryne, who has worked on The Hurt Locker. This film also follows his adage of ‘less is more’ and creates a world of expatriates in London who appear to actually belong to the fabric of the city. He says,“We are not taking Indian people and putting them in palatial homes. They live in small houses, they have simple lives, and go about their days very casually.”. Whether this approach has worked remains to be seen. Some of the set design does have a distinct Eastenders feel, although the moon over London delivers a wonderful cameo in this tale of well-meaning deceit (Read the reviews here).

Sometimes when he looks back at his diploma film, Mr Lobo is surprised by its intensity, both from a director’s perspective as well as cinematographically, “That kind of intensity, that kind of approach to cinema is not very common right now in the films that we make. At the moment, we are functioning the way the market is.” He longs to be able to invest time into a project that touches upon such grit, such passion. His music videos are dynamic urban landscapes that reflect his restlessness, “No outside agency is stopping me, it’s just myself. I can get a producer, I can get actors, I have enough energy to motivate a whole crew. What is stopping me is the amount of work I need to put in internally to make a script work. I’m not expecting anybody else to set it up for me. I know that I have to be that instrument of change. It might take a bit more time than one might expect.” At just 36, he does have time on his side.