The Power of Stories: Kiran Rao on Creativity, Cinema, and Opportunity

This is a podcast of the International Finance Corporation 

Makhtar Diop: Hello, I’m Makhtar Diop, Managing Director of the International Finance Corporation. Welcome to Creative Development with IFC. Today, I’m very happy to welcome a visionary filmmaker and storyteller, Kiran Rao. For more than 20 years, Kiran has made a strong mark in Indian cinema. Her films are known for powerful stories that connect with many people. She has challenged conventions, given a voice to the unheard and touched art in India and around the world. Now, as Indian films are winning global recognition, her work shows the future of filmmaking, both as art and as business. So Kiran, it's such a pleasure to have you in our discussion on art, on Creative Industries. Tell us this virus of filmmaking. Where did it come from? 

Kiran Rao: Well, I've been interested in the arts since I was little. I used to love to act in school. I loved literature and poetry and music. But I didn't really realize that all these different art forms actually find a very beautiful common playground in film making. And I only discovered that when I went to do my masters in mass communication. I actually did my bachelor's in economics, and I wanted to do developmental economics. And somehow, after my Bachelor's, I realized that I wouldn't be entirely happy if I didn't work through the arts in doing anything that I do. So I wasn't sure what, and I was lucky enough to get into one of the most prestigious sort of universities teaching mass communication in Delhi, called Jamia Millia Islamia and the school is called Mass Communication Research Center. And in the two years of my masters, I had the opportunities to, sort of to learn photography and sound, and, of course, shooting on film and also research and, kind of trying to understand where in this world of filmmaking I was most comfortable and happy. And it sort of led me towards direction, though I was very, very interested in cinematography, but I ended up wanting to be a director. So it took many, many years after school to even realize that what I wanted to do was work in film. 

Makhtar: But as a director you're a serious person, but you have a lot of humor in your movies. You treat very serious topics in a funny way to make it lighter as you introduce it, you know. So tell us a little bit about your personality and this duality between seriousness and lightness. 

Kiran: There's not that much seriousness. Honestly in class I used to be the clown, and, the teachers would ask me to stand on stage and entertain people, because I was very talkative as a child. Loved to act, loved to play the fool and mimic people and things like that. And I think I just enjoyed seeing people's response when I would act the fool. And so I think while film school, sort of gave me the more artistic sort of understanding of cinema, I think instinctively, I was always drawn to the kind of film that, you could enter more lightly in in a more inclusive way, rather than a very intellectual way, you know. So while my first film is its is a very traditional first film, it tries to sort of through a very personal lens, look at a subject. I was very influenced by some of the artists that I saw in film school, and that comes through in my first film. But my second film, I think I was much more confident to try something lighter and speak about all the things that I'm very passionate about, but through humor and through the idea of satire and trying to take this very complex society of ours and maybe, show people a slightly different perspective through humor, 

Makhtar: Interesting, you know, I think of people like Spike Lee, who also have this way of treating very complex social issues with humour. And I just watched his last movie.  

Kiran: Highest 2 Lowest 

Makhtar: Exactly, it is just interesting to see some complexity and that lightness also is something which makes it up. 

Kiran: I think humor is a great way to actually address some of the more difficult subjects or challenges that we face as a society. Because 've always felt that when people are laughing, they're at their most vulnerable, their most open, their most in some way accepting of new ideas. Because when you're laughing say at yourself. You're still thinking about it you can, you can see someone just like you and laugh at him. But you're also thinking about the ideas of the filmmaker, while you're enjoying the moment, which is what happens, I hope, in my film, [Laapataa Ladies] where, lots of things are sort of critiqued, but they're critiqued in a funny way, so that while you're laughing, the knife goes in, and you feel it yourself as well. 

Makhtar: You bring a dimension of the other real life in India. Trains are something so important in the culture. People are chatting,  preparing the meal at home in the train. They made friends by meeting every day at the same time at a train station. So you talk about rural world, you talk about women, you talk about train. So how did you connect all these? 

Kiran: You know,[Laapataa Ladies] the original idea was written by a writer called Biplab Goswami, and it was originally written pretty much like this, where these two young brides who are in veil are going to their husbands homes by train. And it's set about 20 plus years ago before the connectivity that we have now with the internet. And because of the very similar veils, the girls get swapped and actually the railway station forms a very important part of the story, because one of the girls gets left behind at the station. And I think trains are very emblematic, somehow, of India and the great sort of Heartland and the rural landscapes of the country. I think we have had now a very, robust rail service for almost 100 years, and honestly, you meet the most incredible diverse mix of people, both on the train and on the platforms. So it was really fun for me, because I come from a very middle class family. I've grown up taking trains all my life as a child while visiting my grandparents, and even for school trips. And it was an opportunity for me to show the beauty of the Indian rural countryside, the people that you meet who have very little, but are so full of warmth and generosity and as one of the characters in the film says, people are never quite what they seem. Don't judge a person by the way they look. They could be quite different when you actually get to know them. And, I think that's so true of India, you find a lot of openness and generosity where you least expect it. And I wanted to include that because it was in the film anyway. But the writer of this screen play, Sneha Desai changed a lot of the characters on the railway station. And I think that became something that is very important to me, and absolutely loved, doing that - the railway station set. 

Makhtar: The railway has been in a lot of movie genre. The railway is always present when we are growing up watching Western. But you personally, what was the thing strikes you more , that takes you more from your journeys in the train. 

Kiran: You actually said it when you said, you take food from home. I traveled at a time when second class trains had the people walking up and down the train serving food. You would stop at various stations to buy the local delicacy on the on the platform, but often you would go for long distances without the train stopping, and so you would carry food that you hoped would not spoil over 36 hours. So I remember my mother preparing for a train journey, because our journeys from Calcutta to those days, Madras and then Bangalore would take 36 and sometimes, if the train was delayed, could take 40 hours or 48 hours. And you could never, in those days, be very certain of the food that you could buy on the station. And my mother was worried that we might be sick, so she would pack the food and I always remember how, she would as it was taken out for us across the course of that journey, it would be the food that would spoil first, that would be taken out first, and by the end of the journey, we were eating the really dry, dry meals, you know? But it's very emotional for me. Actually, I had some of my happiest times traveling by train. Now, actually, it is quite different, because India is so developed. But back then, you see so much of the country as you pass. You know, you would pass rivers and hills and empty, beautiful fields, little villages dotting the countryside, not much light at night. You could tell far away, that there was a village. I mean, I know it sounds romantic, but and it was quite could be quite difficult, because we would carry our bed rolls, and often, because it was so crowded, I would sleep on the ground between the seats. And my mom, when I was little, would sleep with me on the bunk. But sometimes I would sleep down there, and there would be cockroaches. And, it had its share of, challenges, but it built us as even now I'm quite happy to rough it out and the train, the train toilets were quite, quite difficult. So, we grew up well prepared for life, I'd like to say. And of course, as soon as the journey starts, your neighbors start opening up their food, and then it's a it's a picnic on the train, and the whole bogie is just full of like the fragrances of India. Someone's Gujarati, someone's from the south, someone's from Bengal, you start having conversations. Really it was not enough that I had a very short bit in the train. But I think a lot of it comes through on the platform, where you see the kinds of people who come to eat at Manju Maai, this lady's stall. So yeah, it was wonderful for me to be able to capture some of that. 

Makhtar: So, food, train, different side of India brought you to something which is, what is the role of women and the way women are treated in the society? Tell me a little bit about how you brought all that to focus on that topic. But also, how do you see that conversation, not only in India, but outside India? Because you travel a lot. 

Kiran: I do, and I find it quite interesting how, despite, different countries having different degrees of development, different sorts of approaches to cultural issues, to religion, etc. I still feel that most women across the world have felt in some way a resonance with my film, wherever I have shown it, for instance, in Japan, where it ran for a very, very long time, almost for a year the film was running, I had incredible conversations with people there who felt that the patriarchy that's depicted in the film is not very different on some level, even if the cultural traditions are different. So I do think that women have fairly similar experiences in many, many parts of the world, regardless of even social status. The question is that women have been for too long, conditioned to know their place, to speak when spoken to, to accept certain sorts of expectations of them in terms of their behavior, in terms of their own hopes and dreams and that actually is fairly culturally agnostic. I think patriarchy has sort of transcended culture and found itself embedded almost everywhere. Of course, many, many, many countries have worked consistently, have had very, very radical and, important women's movements, and have made that those strides in, ensuring that women have a place on an equal stage. But I don't think it's quite there for a vast majority of women across the world. And that's what I've found, also traveling with my film, is that whether I've shown it in the US or in Shanghai, in China, I've of course, shown it all across the country. Here, I've met people who've seen it on Netflix from all over the world. They all feel a certain connection with the ideas that the story kind of tries to address and that I think is for me, very, very rewarding, because the idea really was to say that we need to be inclusive in our idea of equality. We need to include men in this conversation, very importantly, and we need women to be given the right to choose what they feel is the way they would like to live their lives, and that's actually - choice, is what the film most sort of, assertively kind of offers as a way forward. 

Makhtar: So let's move on to a totally different world – AI. Tell us what is your take on AI and creative industry in general.

Kiran: So interestingly, I'm actually executive producer on a film called Humans in the Loop, made by a first time director called Aranya Sahai. And it was a film actually that came out of a fund by an initiative called Museum of imagined futures, and the idea was to try and look at the intersection of technology and society and responsible tech. And this film actually dives into what actually AI industries are doing across the world in terms of the disruption, of course, is, as we know it, in many forms of, sort of work processes, and we in our film industry are seeing how it is affecting every level and layer of work. But this film looks at a woman who is a tribal woman in a in a state called Jharkhand, in one of our eastern states, and she's a Adivasi or a tribal woman, and so you would never associate AI with, technically, with, tribal areas or tribals. But here is a woman who is working at a data labeling Center, which is what actually tech companies have set up in many parts of the world where labor is cheap as well. So it's really looking also at the labor that goes into creating these systems, but also how in a place like Jharkhand, which has some of the most ancient tribes with very, very complex and deep knowledge systems about the world around them are now labeling or tagging the world for an artificial intelligence. So the film really draws a parallel between she is a mother. She is a young mother. This woman in the film, but draws a parallel between parenting any new intelligence and what that new intelligence will grow up to be, so AI is at that stage, in my opinion, we are all sort of taking to it almost without really realizing. What kind of impact it's going to have on us and on, the world economy at large. But quite apart from that, to take a step back, actually, really the film encourages us to look at how AI is being built, especially in terms of equitability and in terms of representation of the Global South, because a lot of AI companies, as we know are, set up by companies from developed countries and and in that sense, the needs that this technology is fulfilling, is that of a company, say, set somewhere in California, and does that algorithm, that machine learning methodology, really include people who are diverse, and will it actually carry the same sorts of prejudices and biases that the people creating it have and that, I think, is a huge ethical argument and a discussion that we should be having worldwide, because it's going to impact and as we know, all of this just becomes a sort of a ripple effect, and before We know it, these systems exist in everything that we use, and we feel somehow that technology is, is God like or more fair? Because it it is a machine, and therefore it does not have the biases of humans. But what if it has exactly the same biases as humans, because it's being created with those biases. So I have an interest in understanding what AI is going to do, of course, to us in terms of disrupting how we create in our industry. And I'm really interested to see whether we can work with tech innovators to see that it is more ethical, more fair, more equitable, more representative of, the diversity of the world, rather than just a Western perspective.

Makhtar: Now you're perfectly right. I think that this is something that concerns a lot of people. The fact that larger learning models are trained with data which are largely from from the west and which are not as diverse as you mentioned. But do you envisage in your in your upcoming movies to use some AI? 

Kiran: Yes, unfortunately, we can't now deny its incredible efficiency in performing certain tasks for us. I do think it's going to be a while away before it's entire scripts are written by AI, or we start using, AI to say, edit our films, or anything like that. But it, I don't think it's that far away, especially because there's this certain not just efficiency, but it's been designed to sort of provoke interesting, sort of ideas from creators, and that's what we like about it. It's like it positions it in a certain way for you, which helps you go forward, whereas when you're working alone, it often you reach a creative dead end. And this can spark a new idea. So I do think especially in things like, for instance, dubbing an actor entirely in a new language, I mean things like that that are just simply time efficient. I think those kind of functions will quite easily be taken up by AI and already are subtitling, dubbing, VFX, of course, is quickly catching up, but I do think it'll be a while before we can have entirely AI completely from scratch created actors, for instance, because the consistency, the depth, the little things, the subtleties that go into performance, let us say, which makes us human, is what I don't know if AI will be able to do so quickly. 

Makhtar: Let’s come to the Bollywood industry. What do you see as being the main challenge? I know a lot of you are now on Netflix. But what do you think about the industry? What do you think is a challenge? Is it financing? Is an organization?  

Kiran: So I think the film industries of India, because we have many of them have many challenges. I think some of the industries in our country have managed to circumvent them because they are slightly smaller. But the Hindi film industry, which was the more gargantuan, more country wide industry, has always had multiple issues because of its size and also because of the fact that it was recognized as an industry not more than 10 or 15 years ago. It was just entrepreneurial. It was an industry, but it was never given the benefits of an industry never looked at as an industry or developed as such. And so I think organization even policy around filmmaking, which would encourage a more sort of long view on what the industry can build in terms of culture, in terms of just film infrastructure for a new generation of filmmakers is completely lacking. We have filmmakers or producers or studios that are entirely dependent on themselves and their own wherewithal to create or to make profits and then plow that back into cinema. And what that does when you have the short view of recouping on an investment is that you're not really looking to develop an industry for the long term, for risk taking, for new types of storytelling. You're looking at what would work so that you could recoup your investment and I think that has been the biggest challenge, and I know a lot a lot of people are always complaining about the quality of storytelling and the fact that they're not newer stories, or the Hindi Film Industry is not taking enough risks. And as a producer, I know that comes from the fact that nobody has your back it's so what ends up happening is everybody's sort of working in their silos, and it's not creating a good ecosystem that's healthy that encourages new voices, that allows for n ew kinds of storytelling, that also rewards good storytelling. So I feel it's a big it's quite a long conversation. It's something I feel that needs an overhaul. It needs all the stakeholders to come together to understand where we are going wrong and how we could set it right. And having the government look at the different film industries of India as a soft power, as a cultural ambassador for the country. Investing in these industries more actively, and I do think that the because of streaming, for instance, as you said, the film industry for a moment, felt like, Okay, we. Can sidestep the kind of stranglehold that exhibitions and exhibitors and distribution have on our films getting to an audience, and we can create films and series for OTT but, but that's also in the short run has proved to be a bottleneck, because there's only that much content that even a streamer can actually acquire or commission.  

Makhtar: Do you think that there is enough patient capital going to the movies industry?

Kiran: No, not enough capital. No, I think it's people are essentially the people who've invested in films. Either are investing in films because they want to be part of a glamor industry, or they think that there is great. Upsides, if you tick certain boxes, it's a big action film. It has three heroes. It has various one hero from the north, one from the south. And you feel like you've got a pan India film. And unfortunately, none of those formulae really work. So the patient capital that you need that is in there for the long run. That's in there with a vision to look to where storytelling is going in this new world where everybody's attention is actually what we're all fighting over. We're fighting over it not just from other industries, film industries in the world, we are actually competing with social media, with gaming, with restaurants, with live music, with comedy shows. People have many things to do with their time and we are just one of them. Unlike maybe five or 10 years ago, when going to a movie was a habit. People enjoyed watching films together as a group. It's a time of reckoning. And honestly we're all sort of finding our way, and it would be great if we could find our way together with a view to how to make the industry overall more healthy. 

Makhtar: So let me go back to the first topic, gender. Is there a gender issue in the cinema industry In India? 

Kiran: there's been significant change. I'd like to say it. Like all industries in our country, women are underrepresented, absolutely, there's no doubt in my mind. In fact, there's quite a few studies to show how women, both off screen and on screen, are quite underrepresented, both in terms of being part of the crew, especially in decision making, roles like director, producer, cinematographer, writer. But quite apart from being under underrepresented, what I've felt is that in the last 20 years, 25 years that I've worked in film, there's a there's been a significant uptick in women joining the industry, not just as actors, and I can take pride in that I as someone who came into the industry with no background in film, no one I knew at all, was very warmly welcomed. Worked with people who treated me exactly the same barring, you know, you find misogynistic people everywhere. It's not just in the film industry. So there have been occasions when I've had run ins with a particular cinematographer who didn't like to be told by a young slip of a girl what to do, because she was the first ad, and he didn't think first ad's were anything. So there have been, of course, instances like that, but by and large, I have to say that the industry has been incredibly welcoming of women, and I think what we need more than anything is to encourage women. It's hard for anyone. It's not just women. Anyone coming into the industry has to fight to get their story heard, to find the right producer, the right actor to back their story. It's regardless of your gender. So we want to encourage women to be confident and follow their passion, fight for the stories that they believe in. And they'll eventually find a director or a producer, or backing for their story.

Makhtar: I can talk to you for four hours. It is beautiful. And I and I look forward to seeing your new movie. Also, yes on AI Yes, because what you say - raising a kid while you have a certain technology, which is growing like a kid is a nice parallel to think about, and the way you're looking at it is quite exciting.  

Kiran: Thank you