Page 196 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Epilogue: Ray Talks about the Apu Trilogy 183

the train. All of that I found very effective and very well

done: exactly as I had conceived them. The longeurs in

the film are largely because of the poor soundtrack. If

there had been more for the ear to absorb, those scenes
wouldn’t have seemed so long.

AR: You have said that the flow of ideas is something you
can neither account for nor recapture. Do your best ideas
come to you quickly – even in a fl ash?
SR: ‘In a flash’ is just the expression I would use. For
instance, the scene in Pather Panchali where Apu throws
the necklace into the pond and the scum spreads, then
closes in again, I think that’s a lovely thing. It happened
on a certain day when we were not shooting, just sitting
by the pond. The weather had turned bad or something
like that and there were pebbles which I was throwing
in. Suddenly I noticed this phenomenon happening. In
the original novel, Apu just throws the necklace into the
bamboo forest, and that was also in my script. Then it
struck me how wonderful this would be. It’s like that – I
jumped up almost at the marvellous idea. ... This whole
business of creation, of the ideas that come in a flash,
cannot be explained by science. It cannot. I don’t know
what can explain it but I know that the best ideas come at
moments when you’re not even thinking of it. It’s a very
private thing really.

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