Page 171 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

158 The Apu Trilogy

particular into the universal was a revelation to me. I was 18
or 19 years old and had grown up in a very parochial society
of Italian-Americans and yet I was deeply moved by what
Ray showed of people so far from my own experience. I was
moved by how their society and their way of life echoed the
same chords in all of us. I then sought out other Ray fi lms

like Devi, The Music Room, Two Daughters, and later Distant
Th under.

I was very taken by the style of these films – at first so much
like the Italian neo-realist films, yet surprising the viewer with

bursts of sheer poetry. Ray’s use of music impressed me so
much that I sought out and eventually found soundtracks to
his films, such as Ravi Shankar’s music from Pather Panchali.

Ray’s magic, the simple poetry of his images and their emo-
tional impact will always stay with me.

On his first visit to the United States in 1958, Ray met a
number of established American directors and writers. In New
York he had long chats with Elia Kazan, Paddy Chayevsky and
Sidney Lumet, and in Hollywood talked to Stanley Kubrick,
George Stevens and Billy Wilder, who was then shooting Some
Like It Hot. ‘You won a prize at Cannes?’ was Wilder’s opening
shot to Ray. ‘Well, I guess you’re an artist. But I’m not. I’m just
a commercial man, and I like it that way.’ While visiting all the
major studios, he became ‘absolutely terrified by the plethora of
equipment and personnel’, despite the forewarning impression
he had received from Renoir in 1949. Two aspects of his trip
particularly lodged in his mind: there were no ‘poets’ among the
directors he met, and virtually no one had more than ‘the vagu-
est notions about India’. An MGM executive he lunched with
in the studio’s basement cafeteria proudly confided to him his
casting for a film about the Buddha – Robert Taylor! As Ray
remarked soberly in a letter to the Sri Lankan director Lester
James Peries in December 1958, after he got back home to
Calcutta: ‘One realises what the Indian film-maker is up against

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