Multiple National Award winning editor of Raavan, A Sreeker Prasad, has spoken out, countering claims from Bollywood heavyweight Amitabh Bachchan that “sad editing” of the increasingly divisive film is responsible for the poor audience response.
Mr Bachchan’s complaint with the editing of the film was publicly made on social networking site Twitter, two days after Raavan’s release, when Amitabh Bachchan (tweeting as @SrBachchan) opined that:
“Lot of merited film edited out, causing inconsistent performance and narrative. Abhishek’s erratic behaviour was due to symbolic 10 heads visually appearing and each giving him different attitudes to adopt for a situation, he would then finally shake them off and decide… It’s sad, in the edit you only see the after-effect of that thinking process, hence inconsistent. In the edit, all the visual heads got cut and you see a confused Beera expression and wonder why?”
Prasad says that while he does not wish to hurt Amitabh Bachchan, he stands by his editing decisions, recently stating:
“As a member of the audience, he (Amitabh Bachchan) has the right to say whatever he wants to. We’ve been in the process of editing Raavan for a year and a half. I have gone through the footage with Mani [Ratnam] so rigorously. We were probably in the best position to judge what was good for the film.”
Prasad further explains:
“There is a reason for it. The director chose to start the narrative on a very high note. It begins with the kidnapping and moves straight ahead to the finale. We had no back projection, no explanations, and no character establishment. We chose to tell our story in this way. We didn’t want to spoon-feed the audience.”
“Mr Bachchan wanted us to graphically show ten heads. Mani and I tried that. But we made a conscious decision not to get into that area. We decided to let the audience get into the character’s head as the narrative progressed. I am sure there are lots of people who didn’t get the point. But it was a risk worth taking. Because a certain section did comprehend.”
