Page 184 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

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whether he could put up with them. Selznick protested: ‘No!
With you it’ll be different, because, you know, John Huston used
to come drunk on the set, so I had to be careful with him, I had
to control him, so I sent memos.’ Ray said he would think about
it. That evening, before the award ceremony, he found a little
envelope waiting for him at his hotel. ‘In it was a memo from
Mr Selznick,’ recalled Ray, ‘outlining the speech that I was sup-
posed to make, saying would I memorise the six- or seven-line
speech that he had written. Well, I made a different speech. It
virtually amounted to the same thing because all you had to do
was lead up to the name, which was a great secret. There are a
hundred different ways of doing that, so I chose my way of doing
it – not Mr Selznick’s way. After that, of course, he didn’t write
to me again.’
The other important aspect of Ray that Anderson left out of
his reckoning in imagining him transplanted to foreign soil, was
his popularity with his home audience. Ray was as successful as
Bergman was in Sweden, or Kurosawa in Japan, perhaps more
so. He hit an all-time high in Bengal with The Adventures of
Goopy and Bagha in 1968, but there was barely a film he made
that did not have an appeal well beyond the confines of a high-
brow audience – including, of course, the Apu Trilogy. Without
artifice he packed his films with layers of meaning that pleased
everyone in different ways, from university professors who nor-
mally despised Indian cinema to sentimental housewives brought
up on songs and dances in movies and even the better-educated
members of Calcutta’s vast working class. No one else in Indian
cinema has been able to pull off this feat with more than the
occasional film, although the fact is not widely appreciated in
India outside the Bengali-speaking region. The Bollywood
film-maker’s view of him was probably summarised by Ramesh
Sippy, the maker of the blockbuster Sholay, who in 1983 said: ‘I
always regard Ray as the first moderniser of the Indian cinema
and its first artist. The level to which he goes in probing his
characters is beyond the reach of an ordinary viewer ... Ray will

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