Issue 2, 2010 Volume 7 - Kodak

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Throw
out the
Rulebook
Deepa Deosthalee talks to hotshot DOP C.K. Muraleedharan
about his ad work.
C.K.Muraleedharan believes that a cinematographer should do something new with each film and
never settle into a style. And that everything must come from the script. Which is why he’s very
selective of the films he does, both in cinema and in advertising. His impressive body of work
includes films like Lage Raho Munnabhai, Johnny Gaddaar and 3 Idiots and commercials for a wide
range of products from Cadbury’s and Surf Excel to Tata Sky and Airtel. Muraleedharan believes
advertising is going through an interesting phase where innovation is the keyword and the rulebook
has gone out of the window.
He’s the man who shot the highest-grossing Hindi film of all time, 3 Idiots. But for Muraleedharan,
it’s never been about the money. Unlike a lot of other cinematographers who dream of making it big
in Bollywood, he shied away from feature films for a long time because he didn’t connect with the
cinema of the ’70s and ’80s and focussed on documentaries and television mini-series instead. His
career in advertising too has run a similar course. “I’ve been in and out of advertising. I assisted
Barun Mukherjee 30 years ago when I first came to Mumbai. There was a time when I practically
lived at Famous Studios and did plenty of leftover stuff on different ad films. That was before the
digital era, when every effect had to be created manually,” he recalls.
“The audience is now used to seeing all kinds of images on
television and the internet. So they won’t believe anything
you show them unless you’re sure about
where you want to lead them.”
Facia
Eno
A physics graduate from Kerala, Muraleedharan believes his academic
background actually helped him a lot in his advertising work. He worked
with directors like Prahlad Kakkar, Ram Madhvani and Sumantra Ghoshal in
the 1990s. But somewhere along the way, he lost interest and consciously
moved away from shooting ad films. “Those days the look of ad films was
standardised – soft, polished and mushy. Beyond a point I got bored with
this set format and moved on to feature films instead. It wasn’t exciting to
spend 12 hours lighting up a teacup or a steel jar.”
But in recent years, he’s back on the circuit after what he describes as a
“change in the patterns and mood of ad films… From happy, peppy, smiley
images, we are now dealing with material that’s gritty, dark and realistic.
Over the past few years, both internationally and locally, the language of
expression in ad films has changed. Last year I did a commercial for Surf
Excel where a little boy is rolling in the mud to cheer up his teacher whose
pet dog has just died. I’m not into flowery images and prefer playing with
contrasts and silhouettes.”
It was Muraleedharan who shot the first Airtel commercial with Madhavan
and Vidya Balan that was directed by Vinil Mathew, one of his favourite
directors. “We didn’t know how well that film would work when we shot it. But
when we saw the result, I was confident it would strike a chord and it did.”
Kurkure
Airtel
Fa
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