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A small red room in an unassuming building off a bylane in Chennai transports you into an alternate reality. A winding staircase leads up from the ground floor to the mezzanine with a blue carpeted floor contrasted against red roses from floor to ceiling as illuminated by mood lighting.
At the center lies a big egg chair with soft red velvet seating. Behind it, a full-length poster reads “ARR Immersive Entertainment”. Rahman is picking projects that feed his creative and entrepreneurial instincts. “I won the Oscars a long time ago, but now, who cares?” he says. “I am doing work that is close to me and will inspire future generations.”
A manager assists with a headset, tells me to relax, and turns out the lights. For the next 37 minutes, I am transported into a multi-sensory cinematic experience – a place where sight, sound, and scent blur the lines between reality and a parallel universe.
In Le Musk, French actress Nora Arnezeder plays an heiress and a musician who, through her sense of smell, after 20 years of losing everything – including her parents – and finding herself orphaned, goes about tracking down those who re-wrote the course of her life. It is a 37-minute virtual reality film that is also penned and directed by two-time Oscar winner A.R. Rahman. The film is shown in the musical “Bottlenecks,” 12 songs of world music, around the galas of Cannes, for example. Officially, it has yet to come out. I have been lucky to see a first glimpse.
For Rahman, Le Musk has been a lesson in patience, but once it’s released, he will be at the forefront of immersive cinema where viewers become participants in the story rather than mere observers.
57-year-old Rahman is one man who has never stopped experimenting and always reaches for the sky. “Technology and this urge to know more keeps me going. Because it opens up the world for you; there is so much you can do if you know how to do it. I get sleepless if I cant understand how something works-I will ask a hundred people till I learn it myself,” he says.
A stroll through Rahman’s studio reveals the collector he is. With majestic chairs, a scarlet-red piano, and artefacts from around the world, the space feels more like a cafe than a workplace. His team-mostly interns from his music school-seems no older than 25. Vikram, a young assistant in his early 20s, helps set up the camera for the interview. “He noticed my photography skills when I was a teen and has mentored me ever since,” he says. Vikram is now preparing to release his first film as director.
The Rahman today is a world away from the eager front-bencher of the 1990s who wanted to prove his musical mettle. Now a relaxed back-bencher, happy yet more creatively ambitious, he is focused on the larger picture-leaving full artistic mark on global stage. Having composed original scores and songs for 145 films in various languages- Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, English, Persian, Mandarin, and now Mandarin too -Rahman is now picking up projects he wants to do. He no longer has to prove himself: he only takes on what he finds interesting, right from “big-budget films” to massive non-film projects to satisfy his creative and entrepreneurial instinct. “I won the Oscars a long time ago, but now, who cares?” he says. “I am doing work that is close to me and will inspire future generations.”
