When he's shooting a film, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 62, doesn't listen to his actors, critics or the government, nor does he pander to his audience. He does, however, listen to the wind. While shooting his latest film, Shadow Kill, the story of an anguished hangman in 1940s India, Adoor was struck by the thumping sound of nighttime gusts playing on the leaves of a palmyra tree near his set in a rural Kerala village. "It sounded exactly like a heartbeat," he says. It was the rhythm he hadn't been aware he was seeking — a steady drumming, and a reminder of nature's indifference to his characters' troubled passions. "I made the wind a character in my film," Adoor explains. That's perfect casting for an Adoor film: the wind here is gentle and understated — and it's highly unlikely to challenge the director's interpretation of its role.
You've probably never heard of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and for a long time that was fine with him. He's an art-film director in Bollywood-besotted India, and he makes movies not in Hindi but in Malayalam, the language of his native Kerala — two strikes against widespread recognition. A temperamental auteur whose cinematic talents — and ego — are in inverse proportion to his low-key fame, Adoor's intense, demanding films have been worshiped by Indian and foreign critics and celebrated in self-consciously sophisticated Kerala, yet they've barely been released in much of India. But with the visually generous Shadow Kill, the man whom filmmaker Shyam Benegal calls "probably the best director in India today" aims to change the perception that he's a purveyor of small, art-house films. At least he thinks he does. "I want the audience to come and see my work," he says, black eyes flashing. "It's very important to me. But not on their terms. I want them on my terms alone."
Adoor can talk that way because he's had perhaps the most critically impressive career of any Indian director since pioneer Satyajit Ray. He'll give you his résumé if you ask him — and even if you don't. His career path serves as a reminder that art and commerce are often at odds, and frequently mutually exclusive.
Adoor, born in 1941 to a feudal family in a Kerala village that's also called Adoor, was writing and acting in plays from the age of eight. Movies, his family believed, were vacuous spectacles for nostalgic city dwellers. Adoor was planning to study drama, a more respectable art form, when he made an unpleasant discovery: to attend the school in Delhi, he had to speak fluent Hindi. He quickly lowered his standards and instead in 1962 entered India's new Film and Television Institute in Pune, believing that writing for the screen couldn't be too different than writing for the stage. But the New Wave movement was revolutionizing cinema around the globe and inspiring protean directors, from Martin Scorsese in the U.S. to Nagisa Oshima in Japan. Adoor realized that movies could transcend mass entertainment to become art. "I discovered cinema," he says. "Before I thought it was spectacle, something interesting, nothing more than that. Then I discovered the language of cinema, the very experience of cinema as a high art form." After his graduation in 1965, Adoor returned home and took the New Wave message to the masses, forming the state's pioneering film society, organizing its first international film festival and founding the Chitralekha Film Cooperative with other would-be New Wavers. He spent the rest of the 1960s studying avant-garde world cinema (a 1969 visit to the U.S. left him impressed by "all the happenings") and learning the mechanics of filmmaking, from sound recording to accounting ("the most important part"). Then, as now, producers had little interest in backing a high-minded novice who knew more film theory than practice. The process of gathering independent funding for his first feature took seven years. "In a way it was good, because by that time I knew exactly what I wanted," he says. "I wanted to make a film, and I wanted to do it without compromise." That movie, 1972's groundbreaking One's Own Choice, swept virtually every major category at India's national film awards, including Best Film and Best Direction. India's New Wave movement had come of age, and Adoor had become its premier practitioner.
Eight films and more than 30 years later, Adoor has evolved from fiery-eyed New Wave revolutionary to wise old cineast. When I first meet him at his home outside Trivandrum, he's wearing a traditional white dhoti, blue plaid shirt and square glasses that make his black eyes look like marbles in a bowl. He has cocoa-colored skin and wavy white hair that seems to uncoil as the humid Kerala day wears on. The architecture that surrounds him is classically Keralite: the roof is low-slung and pyramidal, and the tiles are red terra-cotta. Egyptian hieroglyphics hang near a miniature print of the Mona Lisa; a pair of Japanese paintings face off against a profile of Lenin. They're mementos of the director's many trips around the global film-festival circuit, reminders that Adoor's movies, like his home, have a local heart but an international soul.
Talking with him is akin to watching his films: long periods of fluency punctuated by moments of silence, when he seems to be marshalling the points of his argument. He may or may not take himself seriously but he does take his work seriously, and the difference between the two is virtually nonexistent. "You are discovering yourself as you make the films," he says. "And it's difficult to be objective." Adoor is a cinematic throwback, an auteur who controls every major aspect of his films: writing, directing, producing, editing. Before filming he shares his scripts only with his longtime cinematographer, Ravi Varma, the sole person aside from Adoor to provide genuine creative input in an Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie. "The actors should be free," he says, "but not so free as to go against my interpretation of the role."
When I ask to see some of his earlier films, he insists on taking me to a cinema in the heart of the city to watch the films on the big screen. As we pick our way through the Trivandrum traffic in his boxy Honda, chasing down a couple of spare prints, Adoor decries "the bankruptcy of mainstream Indian cinema"; he quite proudly states that he almost never watches popular Indian films — except occasionally on TV, where "the commercials actually come as a welcome relief." Adoor's own preferences still run toward the aging European masters who first inspired him. Later I ask him if he has any favorite American directors. "I like Alfred Hitch-cock," he says. Any who are still living? Adoor stops to think. "Woody Allen."