AVC: That's a pretty harsh assessment of such a popular video.
T: I don't know how it stands up. I mean, I haven't seen it for a long time. For me, something like that is always strange. Things date so dreadfully—when something enters the pop culture like that, it is going to get ripped off so badly. Invariably, some people will rip it off well, and people who haven't seen it before will watch it and go, "My God, it's full of clichés!" "Yeah, but they weren't clichés back then!" Whereas if it's a complete bomb, and nobody sees it, then it kind of becomes a critics' baby, and it's never copied, and will stand the test of time. I did a Deep Forest video—well, that's my baby. I love that. And that's the kind of thing nobody can rip off or copy. I think The Fall will be the same. Nobody's going to be nuts enough to rip it off, because it's an uninsurable movie that went all over the world. Those locations will change, and you'll never be able to completely recreate them.
AVC: Do you think your commercials and the early projects you loved so much will ever see the light of day? Maybe via something like the Directors' Series DVDs of video and ad work by Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze?
T: They've asked me a couple of times if I'd do that, and I—mm, maybe. Like, I like it. I think there's a body of work out there, and so much of it is in the ether. I finally talked to somebody about it a week ago, actually. I just said "You know, organize it. Maybe there is a body of work that's worth visiting."
AVC: Your bios all say you came over here to study business at Harvard, but presumably you didn't actually get a business degree.
T: No, no, I didn't even go to Harvard! Basically, I told my dad that I wanted to study film when I saw a book in India. It said, Guide To Film Schools In America, and it changed my world. If you come from a culture like Japan's or India's, you think you just go to college to study something that you hate and your parents love. And for me to see a book called Guide To Film Schools, it was like a book called How To Sleep With Blondes 101. I said, "I'm fuckin' there!" They teach this in school?
So I told my dad, and he said no way. Every year, we'd go to England, because my dad was in the airlines and he got free tickets, and at that point, he just stopped it. He said, "No, you're gonna jump ship." He wouldn't let me come abroad with him unless I graduated in business. I love science, but business was absolutely something I dreaded. So I barely went to college, I lied and cheated like mad, I had other people sit for my exams, everything possible. And then I got a 99 percentile on the GMAT, which got me—I could pretty much go to Harvard. So we applied out there, and my dad said, "Okay, now it's done. He's settled down, calmed down." And he sent me on my way there. He sent me to visit my cousin in Vancouver, and I called from Canada and said "I'm going to go study film." And he said, "Get to the other coast and go straight away to Harvard! Ninety-ninth percentile, you should be able to get in wherever you want!" I said "no," and he said, "Okay, then you don't exist any more."
I had $1,800, and my uncle gave me a $64 ticket down to L.A., the only place I knew an Indian friend from. If he was in Dallas, Texas, I would have gone there. So I went down there, went to every college to try to get in, and couldn't get an admission anywhere. The only place that finally took me was City College, because my background was so non-artistic. And everywhere I'd go, they'd say, "You don't need to go to film school. Just pick up a camera." And "Blah blah blah, Super-8." I knew I was in a retarded state, because I was 24, I'd never held a still camera in my hand. I knew all the theory, but I just didn't know how to approach it, and couldn't get into anyplace. And then the first guy that tried to pick me up on Santa Monica Blvd. was going to City College. And I went out there and realized how great it was, and I got admission straight away. After one term, I realized didn't have any money, so I had a friend register whose name was Randy Marsh, and I got my education under his name. Just made a fake ID, and then I used that to basically make a film that got me a scholarship at the Art Center, changed my name back to the same, and said, "Here I is! Let me fuckin' shoot!"
AVC: Given your successes at this point, did you ever reconcile with your father?
T: A little late, I think. He passed away three years ago. But with my mom, it never made a difference. I mean, first-born Indian son—as far as she's concerned, I've shat marbles since I was 2 years old. My dad, no. I hear that when he retired, they moved to Canada and opened a Laundromat, and he'd tell people about his sons, and what they did for a living. I hear it from other people, but I think he was too much in a position where he couldn't say it out loud, to me. In the last couple years, every year, I take a couple of weeks off to go try to bury as many hatchets as possible, and try to get along. And with our family—you know, a small, immediate Indian family is 21 people. So we just get together wherever we can, in Spain or wherever. I did that at least twice before he passed away, so I think he turned. It was just hard for him to take, that the crazy one was the one who was actually making it.
AVC: Given the power of the Indian film industry, why did you have to come to America to study film?
T: Well, when I was there, it was the biggest film industry in the world, and not a single film school existed. And I think if you look at a lot of those films, you can see why. It's a very nepotistic thing. And their films are lovely—I could relate to them when I was like, 10, 11, 12, 14. But after that, it wasn't something I was very interested in. I had a passion for a more Polish kind of cinema. And I thought, "Well, what can I do?" You couldn't study film anywhere, except apparently, from that book that I'd seen, in America.
AVC: What did you personally get from film school?
T: Everything! Everything, everything. You know, they had to use a shovel and an ax to get me out of school. It took me four and a half years, I would keep taking classes. I didn't want to leave, and I would go back in there in a heartbeat. I just absolutely adored and loved it. Everybody thinks I had a tough journey. Oh my God. If you think I have energy now, you should have seen me then. I was bouncing off the fuckin' walls. I absolutely loved it. You have to understand, I'd never held a still camera in my hand! They taught me how the damn thing works, where to put the—everything! Everything, I owe. And I had the greatest—Indians do this a lot, they say, "Oh, here's an older person. Touch his feet," something I've always hated. And there's a teacher from City College that whenever I see—I know it probably still embarrasses him—I just go straight to him and touch his feet. I think he just formed my life. Everything aesthetic, everything literary, and everything that I read—if I hadn't met anyone else, he would have introduced me to it. And it just—I met amazing teachers that taught amazing classes that were just amazing people.
AVC: Given the visual tableaux you lay out in your films, it almost seems like you have more of a photographic sensibility than a cinematic one. Did you have any interest in photography, or go out of your way to get an education in photography?
T: I don't. My dad took lots of photographs when we were kids, and they were all in negatives, just sitting around. My mom gave them to me, and as a present to all my siblings, I made an album. It's shocking, it just looks like a time capsule. It's like seeing Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now—you think, "Oh my God, he's so old now, and he looks so young and beautiful in the film, and he looks exactly like he could walk out of there." For me, those photographs did that. And a friend of mine recently said, "My God! Look at your dad's tableaux!" As kids, he'd take us places and line us up height-wise, or have us make a pyramid. We'd be like, "Why doesn't dad do pictures like normal people, just throwaway, people-having-fun photos?" [Laughs.] So I looked at those, and I thought, "My God! There is a gene for this!"
But no, I didn't have any photographic background, even though one of my biggest influences was my second girlfriend in college, who was a photographer. The people in the photo department were 20 million times harder-working than the people in the film department. You know, it was just really, really thought about, what they put in front of the camera, which sometimes you have to do and sometimes you don't, when you're doing film. A lot of times, you just have to get out of the way of people doing a good performance. And sometimes you actually need to put what you are thinking, what's is in your head, in front of the camera. You know, like I said, there's absolutely nothing special about me. There's genotype plus environment makes phenotype. My genes, there's about another billion of me in India. I think my environment was very interesting, growing up in the Himalayas, and going to Iran—exposure to just different things at an early life just have made me the person I am. There's nothing else special there at all.
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