In conversation with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

Without Mani Ratnam, Bollywood might never have known Aishwarya Rai.

Speaking to media in a global video conference on Friday night, the former Miss World, who was a top model in her teens, said she only became an actress because she was offered a film with Ratnam, one of India’s most respected directors.

“I’d been getting offers for films, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do movies. I wanted to pursue my architecture studies, but the day I knew it was possible to work with Mani Ratnam, the genius that he is, I decided movies were the way forward,” she told media gathered from India, the United States and the UAE.

Rai made her debut with Ratnam’s Iruvar (The Duo) in 1997. “And I knew working on a film with him would be the perfect school,” she added. “From Iruvar to Raavan, my career has been a wonderful journey so far.”

Two versions of Raavan have been in shot, in Hindi and in Tamil, and the Hindi version will also be dubbed into Telugu, another Indian language. Rai plays Ragini, a classical dancer married to a police offer (Vikram). When the pair are posted to a small town in northern India, they clash with tribal leader Beera (Abhishek Bachchan), who controls the area and abducts Ragini.

The film takes its name from the villain in the Ramayana, a classical Indian epic at whose centre is a battle of good and evil between the Hindu god Rama and the demon king of Lanka, Ravana, who has kidnapped Rama’s wife Sita.

Rai, often referred to as the most beautiful woman in the world, has not been seen on the silver screen in nearly two years – that’s not counting the dismal Pink Panther 2 – and she desperately needs Ratnam’s magic to deliver her a hit.

She heaped praise on the talented auteur during the course of the two-hour event.

“Working with Mani Ratnam whets your appetite and your hunger for more. He’s so demanding and takes so much from you that, creatively, that spoils you. And you just want more,” she said.

While Raavan has been a physically demanding film to shoot, Rai and co-star Vikram faced a particular challenge in shooting two different-language versions back-to-back. “By far the toughest thing was shooting two films in different languages,” she said, talking of how Ratnam and his crew would can a scene for the Hindi version and instantly shoot another one for the Tamil. “We’d get it right and then there’d be a need to do one more – in the same conditions, while the light was holding. That speed was extremely challenging,” she said. “But as a team it’s not about the number of takes or times, it’s about getting that magical moment.”

A happy consequence of that is that Rai is now so confident with her Tamil, she has no qualms about being given final dialogues on the day that scene is being shot. She has so far only worked on a handful of Tamil films.

“Before, I’d panic if I didn’t get the scene the previous day. But with the pace at which we were working on this film, my nerves have gone, now I can jump into the deep end and swim,” she said.

Rai’s next Tamil film, Endhiran (The Robot), which also stars Rajnikanth, is set for a November release. “Now I say, ‘yeah, yeah, bring the scene in the morning, on the set’,” she said. A last-minute delivery of lines is seen as normal in Indian cinema.

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