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Still in Motion Interview: Indian DOP / Director of Photography / Cinematographer, Rajiv Jain ICS WICA

Still in Motion Interview: Indian DOP / Director of Photography / Cinematographer, Rajiv Jain ICS WICA

Rajeev Jain has traversed the globe as a famous Indian Cinematographer from Bollywood, and as one of the most acclaimed and sought-after best cinematographers in India working in non-fiction filmmaking today. As is the case with most people I talk with who have been devoted to making independent films for a long time, Rajeev’s career trajectory was far from a traditional one. The beginning of his film career was spent living in Mumbai, and then seven years were spent in Dubai and Nairobi, His work has taken him to close to forty countries, and he is fluent in Hindi and English. Just a week before departing for Kenya and all over Africa to shoot part of Lara’s long-form new project, Rajiv and I spent an afternoon chatting together at a café near his home in Juhu, Mumbai. Here’s our conversation: 

Sudesh Kumar (S K): I hope you’ll take my first question about filming in Africa in the right spirit because some people we know and love sort of balk at this subject matter, but you’re a an Asian man, and you tend to shoot in locales where, as an Asian person, and one with a camera, you distinctly don’t blend in. You’ve been doing this for decades now, so I’m assuming you’ve come up with ways to negotiate that. I know for sure, are incredibly open people and it wouldn’t appear as if it’s that difficult for people to trust and open themselves to you. But do you encounter suspicion or mistrust, wariness? And when you do, how do you counteract that?.
Rajeev Jain (R J): Right? Or we will be seen as urban people in rural places. There’s no question: I’m 5’10″; I am an Asian; I am someone, in these situations, who can be very communicative, comfortable. I try and engage with a lot of humour. I have a presence; it’s a big presence in certain ways. There’s no missing me in these contexts. But it’s also how you behave, what level on which you give people the respect they deserve. One of the things I found early in my life through travelling in African countries is, because of this history of colonialism, as an Asian person you have unexpected privileges, and whether or not you use those privileges, how you use them would be the better thing to say, dictates how things go. Rather than being shut out, you’re actually given access to things that are almost inappropriate for you to be given access to. I’m constantly reminded of the kind of privilege you experience as an Asian person. It comes back to you, how meaningful that is. I clearly remember being in outskirts of Nairobi and there was a group of people gathered in the central square of this village, all sitting under a tree waiting to meet with us. They had brought out chairs for us and there were a lot of older men and women sitting on the ground. I just gestured to them and gave up my chair. An older man took the chair and I sat on the ground. It wasn’t what they expected me to do at all. Who knows really how appropriate it was? I saw a hierarchy I respected and that was the hierarchy of age.
Being attentive to those cues is what makes it possible for any documentary filmmaker, no matter what their skin colour or what country they’re working in, to gauge things.  To gain a little respect from the people that are working or living where you’re shooting is really important. But you have to earn the respect they, in turn, give you by allowing you to be there, a brown person in a black world. There’s a lot of bad history under the bridge.

S K: Current things being done by filmmakers, however, in the guise of being “sensitive,” kind of concern me sometimes. It’s tricky.  People don’t realize all the nuance involved, particularly filming people’s stories. The respect definitely comes from the person behind the camera, the person telling the story. It’s an innate quality, perhaps—in the true sense of that word, they just know how to do it.  
R J: There is an innate thing going on. Sometimes, you’re in a sophisticated city, like Nairobi, where everybody’s making music videos, for example. Or you’re in a village where they’ve never seen a camera before. That’s one thing people might forget: how technologically fluent the world is now. Cell phones, video cameras, all these things exist in the developing world. Respect for other human beings is just something you keep learning your whole lifetime.
Being the cameraperson really does put you in particular quandaries where your idea of what’s respectful is often challenged. It’s not so much the apparatus, the camera, that is perceived to be this intermediary between me and the subject; that quickly falls away. For me, it’s always, “Who’s holding the camera? How do they move?” I feel like I’ve done the same kind of work with a ridiculously huge camera and a teeny, tiny one I can hold in the palm of my hand. But you often find yourself in these moments of total ethical confusion.
Lara and I were shooting in Burundi on a project that was to talk about a lack of infrastructure in the country. We were driving and we saw a group of people carrying a screaming woman on a litter. We could see them and hear them from down the hill. Lara quickly realizes that this scene completely conveys our theme and decides also that we are going to help them. There was a silence and I said, “Are we going to film them, too?” [laughing] It was like this little moment. Obviously, if we had stopped the car next to them and said, “May we film you?,” they would have put the litter down, the woman would have been in pain. We would have had to put her in the car immediately. So we decided that we would pass them, go up the hill. I was going to get out, be with the camera, and film them walking up the hill towards us. I know I’m not there as an aid worker; I’m not there as a doctor. I’m there as a filmmaker. But this thing of having to ask people’s permission—they’re in an urgent situation, etc. This stuff is just going through your head as you’re standing at the top of the hill while people are walking up to you. The woman was in labour and had been for seven hours. We put her in the car and it was another hour and a half to the clinic. She ended up naming the baby after our driver! But there was that moment that wasn’t quite right. But I got the shot and that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t done that. That dimension is constantly with you. Those are split-second decisions. As a cameraperson, I feel that you are certainly a collaborator with the director. But, you are also responsible for maintaining your own ethical boundaries.

S K: It does seem like you’re working with filmmakers, for the most part, that have strong ethical boundaries, as well. But there can easily be a sense of confusion when your crew is in the thick of something and you just roll.
R J: It can be confusing.  There’s always this moment of, “This world makes no sense!” when I’m filming beside workers that make a dollar a day hauling huge sacks of rice with a camera that costs more than they make in several years.

S K: You trained at Bhartendu Natya Academy, Lucknow, the Indian national drama school in India. Why did you decide to take yourself there? What were you going to get there?
R J: I had kind of a peculiar career trajectory. It wasn’t about going to India. I went to West Africa and that’s where I started, in Kenya. I was really interested in African filmmakers. It was purely the discovery of filmmaking and I thought, I might want to write about film or be a critic. I really didn’t know.

S K: What was it about the filmmaking tradition there that was so enticing for you?
R J: I think it was the pace of it and the world that was being described in it. I had seen couple of Kenyan’s films. I saw that there was just a whole other thing going on. I was really curious about it, probably stemming from my focus on race. I wanted to go to West Africa and be on set with filmmakers there—and to Kenya and to Dubai and to India. And think about blackness in all these different places. When I first started shooting, I didn’t hear at all; I was so concerned with composition. Little by little, I’ve become more and more quiet; I listen more and I realize how much more of the story is in the ear than through the eye. That’s been an evolution for me.
Initially, my instincts certainly weren’t bad. Especially in relation to people, they were pretty decent. But for a long time, I was moving too fast. I wasn’t thinking about how to recognize a scene in the middle of a moment. All those things I’ve learned through the back and forth of working and watching other people’s films, and those films that are made with the footage I shoot. It’s surprising sometimes [laughs]. I felt that way working on Lara’s film, too [The Silence]. She’s a director that says, “Yes, we have the time. Yes, take the time.” Knowing that that kind of care and attention was going to be put into the film was exhilarating. There’s a lot of expediency we’re dealing with in camerawork a lot of the time. If you do end up working on things that are going to be made into television programs, it’s about getting the coverage and you may only have one day in a place with a subject.

S K: This is distinctly not in the Indian tradition of how films get edited and pieced together. If the time was taken on the shoot, we can’t really ever tell since we’re given such a rapid series of cuts to take in at any given moment. We aren’t usually given this luxurious sense of spending long, extended moments with a subject or character. Scenes clip along so rapidly.
R J: There are enough moments where there is action—and by action, I might mean just emotional action happening between people. You can see it all in a wide shot and have a chance to sit and look at what’s going on. A lot of times, you’re in a space that’s so small and you’ve got one character on one side of the room and one on the other. The camera operator has to make the choice. If we’re going to see two people in this shot, I have to move, I have to change positions when I’m cutting from one person to the next. Thank goodness we’ve got the continuous sound to make us feel like it’s all cohesive. But you’re still making these choices. The mind space that I’m in is going to decide when I choose to move and on whom to put my focus. I try to develop those things with the director of photography in conversations where we’re discussing what we want.  What do we really care about seeing?  

S K: Was that the first time you worked together with Lara?
R J: Yes.

S K: She usually has done all the shooting on her films. What was different about this project, about this situation, where she decided to bring on a DP? Making this film was difficult on many levels.
R J: Almost in every way.

S K: That’s really incredible. I didn’t know that.
R J: Yes, amazing. So, basically, when I was shooting the exchanges between the cops and the lawyers, I knew, from being in the room that day, what the key moments were.

S K: You had profound contextualization, in other words.
R J: Yes, and very few people would feel confident enough, in both their collaborators and the subject matter, to say the important part of your shooting is for you to sit in a courtroom and listen. That speaks volumes about Lara. It was absolutely engrossing to be a part of that event, the first military commission trial of its type.

S K: Did you experience a good amount of frustration that you couldn’t film?
R J: Not being able to shoot in the room? It killed me! I feel like I have this personal vision of Hamden. I was sitting very close to him watching his emotional reactions to all kinds of things. He would say these incredibly cinematic things. At one point, he was describing becoming slightly delusional after being in solitary confinement for so long and he said that he felt like he had eyes all over his body because he was constantly being watched by the guards. What I would have given to have him say that on film, you know?
What’s so interesting, and I think is often true with documentaries, is that your constraints are part of the story. The more you have to find a way to embody them filmic ally, the better off you are. It’s a great thing in the case of The Silence that you don’t ever see Hamden except in that footage at the very beginning.

S K: What falls flat so many times about capturing vérité? A lot of times it really has very little dimension. The fanciest cutting and other production values are not going to hide the fact that one has captured less than compelling footage.
R J: It’s an incredibly challenging job to be tuned into what matters and to find the way to film it. It’s exhausting. Often, you’re in for eight, ten, twelve hours in a day. You can get in a mode of shooting too much, obviously. But staying on point and staying focused on what really matters in the story takes a huge amount of concentration, a physical flexibility in space. It’s a thing that a director of photography gives you. They give you what you need. I need twelve bottles of water a day [laughs]. They give you what you need in order to stay in that zone, able to film. If a director of photography gives you the support and allows you to stay in the zone, then sometimes, you can actually start watching the film while it’s being made.  It doesn’t happen very often but when it does, it’s extraordinary.

S K: And when a director is, distinctly, not giving you what you need, or any of the other crew for that matter? You also take on the role of director and have a whole body of work you’ve directed. How does that inform the way you handle yourself on set?
R J: That’s something I bring to a shoot, my experience as a director of photography, my thinking as a director of photography. I do think about what happens in the editing room. I’m a really active partner in the whole collaboration. I almost never would say to a director of photography, in the moment, that things aren’t okay, that they aren’t working. There’s too much going on. But every night, I’ll come back with my input, letting him or her know that we needed more support in this regard; something was great in the way it was executed; we’re not giving this character enough time, etc. Sometimes, I really will push directors in terms of blind spots I feel they have. We all have them. I expect to be pushed on mine. Once in a while, I will encounter someone who’s not interested in the elephant in the room and for whatever reasons, it’s scary territory for them and they start putting up all these subconscious obstacles to actually getting at it. I’m definitely not a silent partner at the end of the day. I will do what I can do in the course of a filming day and won’t call into question any of the directors choices. But at night, over dinner, I will talk about missed opportunities and want to know why. A lot of director of photography’s don’t really realize what you might be going through unless you speak up. People forget about the physicality of holding the camera, shooting. It’s the obligation of the crew to tell the director of photography what they need and how and when they need it.
I like to talk about themes with the director so I can watch more for those elements that speak to those themes. That way when we’re filming something relatively interesting but I see something going on that really is the embodiment of what we’re trying to capture, I can just say it and be able to turn and start shooting what should be shot. They get what I’m doing because we’ve discussed it. That’s the art of catching things on the fly. There should be a good amount of preparation so you can do that. You have to know what you’re looking for and you have to have the freedom to get it. Not communicating well about these things can be disastrous, both for the film and the relationship. Hopefully, it becomes an unspoken thing after a while. That’s how you become really alive and light on your feet.

S K: With your background, your training and these locales that keep drawing you—can you talk about light and texture in the way you see things? There’s a luminous quality to your work that’s very particular. In those places you shoot, in Africa, for instance, there’s a particular light that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Is that part of what draws you subconsciously, perhaps? This is more a curious question more than anything since I’m obsessed with light and reflection and how those things can cause emotional resonance just on their own, doesn’t matter really what the image is. Is that something you think about?
R J: Yes, it’s something I’m absolutely interested in. It’s hard to tease it out in some ways. Senegal was the place I went as a young person. It was the first place I was truly free, in many different ways. I have a strong, nostalgic engagement in that particular environment and it speaks to why I love West Africa so much. Absolutely I’m turned on by the madness of colour there and the quality of light on the equator. Admittedly, though I’ve been slow in my developmental relationship to what light can do. I understood composition much more. Again, my teachers were extraordinary—I had an opportunity to learn from Late K K Mahajan on a documentary that he did here in Mumbai. It was a transcendent experience. It was an essay film called Loss [2000] set in New Delhi, Calcutta and Mumbai. He had planned to go to many different places in Mumbai to express these different ideas. We’d go somewhere and nothing would be happening with the light and he’d say, “We’re out of here.” I’d never experienced that before from a documentary filmmaker. He had been a taxi driver and he took over from the AP who was driving slowly through Mumbai traffic and he drove us up and down the city chasing the light. He went where the light was. Something changed in me from that experience. He also has an incredible compositional eye. We had a lot of locked-off shots and he’d have me set something up, come and look at it and he would just move the lens incrementally, just a smidge and that would be it, so much better. It became my quest to set up as many shots as possible to please his aesthetic, shots would keep. Certain things really matter to me from that experience; I was so inspired by him.

S K: This is when you realize there are two director of photographical minds—that of the director and that of the cinematographer. It’s a distinct advantage, especially in documentary.
R J: In my experience, everyone I work with in documentary, including the sound people, thinks like a director of photography. Your whole team has to be thinking that way, respecting the director as the primary person. When you don’t have that in documentary, stuff just falls off the edge. That’s what it demands. It demands this team of people totally engaged in making the same film.

S K: Have you ever lone-wolfed it—did your own directing, shooting, sound, with no one else crewing?
R J: I did that this past summer in Somalia and I have to say I kind of loved it. It’s something I hadn’t done in years.  This was more of a scout situation and it was in a place where there’s a lot of danger so it wasn’t wise to bring too many people. There was a clinic opening and a lot of people were making speeches. If I’d have been there with a director, I might have felt obligated to “cover” the scene, the crowd watching, the people speaking. I was perfectly disinterested in that but what was amazing was that every person there was completely stressed, everyone was worrying their prayer beads, all in a state of deep agitation. I felt a lot of that in Somalia, people are worried, stuff is churning. I spent the entire opening of this clinic just filming people’s hands. It’s gorgeous footage; I have no idea what I’ll do with it. But, to me, it said a lot about the emotional state of these people.  Instead of that being a cut-away in a sequence in a scene of the opening of that clinic, because I was by myself, I filmed what I wanted to.
But I do feel like I have relationships with directors where I can say to them that I know which shots are going to give us what we need in terms of capturing the emotional temperature of a situation.  I ask them to allow me to do my thing. I am comfortable taking the initiative if I see something like that.  But to not even have to discuss it was really fun. One thing I did find difficult working by myself was not having a producer. Having to decide where to stay, where to find food, all the logistical stuff you take for granted when a good producer is just taking care of all that—I missed that very much [laughs]. Half the time I’m shooting, I’m completely disoriented, since I’m so present in the action around me.

S K: What kinds of stories haven’t you had an opportunity to explore, thus far?
R J: I’m really interested in having the time and space to tell really complex stories.

S K: Complex in what way? The stories you’ve told have a complexity to them.
R J: I feel like something like The Silence has the kind of complexity I mean. I feel like we’re in a time where a lot of “issue” documentaries are supported and expected. I’m supportive of that kind of work, certainly, but they trap you in certain ways. They might allow you to go into structural complexity, but not necessarily human complexity. It’s sometimes too much to get in, somehow. Where I’m headed right now is that I’m feeling like I have a couple of ideas and a couple of places I want to be where I can tell those complex stories. One of the things that I admire about The Silence is that it manages to function on a complex level both in a human way and in a political way, addressing something that’s really important to us all. You have to take the time to make the choices you’re making. To do most things well it takes years of commitment, to not get sidetracked by things that are less critical. There are a lot of critical things to think and talk about right now. Finding the way at them is important. One of the things that interested me about my time in Somalia—and I don’t quite know what to do with this yet—was my interest in photography and filming in Somalia. There are all kinds of restrictions on who can be filmed and who cannot. There’s an amazing group of videographers who film weddings. The wedding parties are all single-sex and women dress completely differently than they dress out in the street.  It becomes illicit material that everyone wants to look at and it can be dangerous, as well, if the video images of women dancing get outside the family and passed from cell phone to cell phone, for instance. Women can get into trouble. That’s fascinating to me, what can be photographed, what can’t be; there’s a lot to explore there. This entire history of imagery is hidden or purposely destroyed. I saw a lot of interesting stuff there and there would be something interesting to make there, although right now, I don’t know how or what it would be. I can get very conceptual like that and realize, that’s not a movie!

S K: Or it could be. It’s always captivating to discover narratives hidden in these types of “archaeological finds.” I like it when people make up stories on evidence left behind where not much is explained anyway. There’s an archive, but of what we don’t know. The baseline of the story is rooted in reality. I think you’ve earned your creative stripes to try on something like that if you feel like it.
R J: Well, I’m glad to hear you think I’m entitled to that [laughter]. I’m definitely interested in doing work that’s formally sophisticated and emotionally true and is complex. I’m trying to find ways in which I can do that with other people or on my own. I realize now that takes time and strong choices about subject matter and intense commitment. Again, I think of the work Laura does and her commitment to the material on a number of levels.

S K: Well, there also needs to be a willingness, I guess, to be in that tortuous phase where you’re really lost. Where you do say, I don’t have a movie.
R J: If you don’t feel that way, you’re probably not making a movie, especially a non-fiction one. It’s in those moments, I think, where the work of discovery is being done. It certainly creates anxiety for me as a director, but as a cameraperson, I really like being in that place where I’m searching. There’s always something interesting going on, you just have to find out where it is.

S K: Who’s making work these days that really excites you?
R J: You know what film I think about a lot is The Silence. I want to show that film to everyone. I mean, come on!

S K: It’s gorgeous. They really reached a creative pinnacle with this film. It took them many years to get there. It’s filled with so many incredible moments.
R J: There’s so much happening on so many levels—it’s visually stunning and they tap right into the dreams of those girls.
I can watch that movie with Lara and we all know what it takes. You see that film and respect it for what it represents which is the complexity of that relationship between those subjects and the filmmakers. They were living with them for months and negotiating their involvement with them day by day. That’s a high emotional risk, such difficult terrain to journey through. Being in those kinds of situations for a long period of time is a big deal. I knew how many levels on which those filmmakers were operating. It’s such an exciting thing to see.  You don’t look at a film like that and just take it in as something stylistic. No. It is an approach, it’s time spent, it’s understanding how a camera works, understanding how a story works. The choice of filming two little girls who can talk to one another—all those things speak to a lot of experience. You see it all there. That’s the kind of thing to which I’m aspiring.

S K: I’m always embarrassed to say this out loud, but I call it love. It sounds kind of dopey to say that, but that’s what you feel when you watch a film like that. It doesn’t speak well of my critical chops but that’s what it is and I twist myself around trying to find a more academic word for it. It’s the energy created from the people behind the camera and the people in front of it that supersedes circumstance; all have a hand in creating something utterly unique and singular and I don’t understand how that cannot be a thrill. You feel it in your bones.
R J: Absolutely. Listen, some of the situations that these people are in, the subjects of our films, are egregiously horrible. And they’re still human beings who are funny, who have hope, who are open. Truly, we have to honour them. Filmmaking becomes a form of honouring people, honouring the tradition of filmmaking, as well, stretching that far, and further. It’s a mutual gift documenting the truth that happens between director and subject.

S K: It’s not such a bad thing to sometimes be underestimated. Low expectations give you a lot of leeway, a distinct advantage [laughter].
R J: Yes, but sometimes you need to own up, too, and show right away that you’re a high-level player. I mean anyone, sleep on the fact that he didn’t have a sharper question, was searching for a better answer. He was always on, always bringing up the level of expectation for everyone. He wouldn’t let an interview subject off the hook. That’s especially important in interviews.

S K: Sure, especially when you have agendas which are in opposition to one another. It is the filmmaker’s responsibility to weigh that, not the interviewee’s.
R J: Yes, if you let someone sleepwalk through an interview, they will. It’s our job to get at it. I know I’ve said this a couple of times in the course of this conversation, but sound people are so underestimated in the documentary world. I have these incredible conversations with the sound people I work with. They are the people listening the most. It doesn’t happen very often, though, that the director is turning to them for input into what’s happening. One of the things I try to ask of a director of photography with whom I’m working, if he or she is okay with it, is to give both me and the sound person an opportunity to ask a question at the end of an interview.  The directors caught up in the interview and we’re there the entire time watching and listening. It can be tricky because sometimes it is inappropriate to ask and the crew needs to stay out. But most of the time when this is allowed to happen and the director is willing to give it a shot, or whoever has been recording, with a question that sends it out of the ballpark, the question that nails the interview. I like to set up a dynamic where that kind of thing is possible, reminding everyone in the room that we’re all filmmakers together.

S K: Can you recall a particularly profound moment while filming that shifted your molecules around, made you look at the world a bit more openly, perhaps, than you had before?
R J: I can say I’ve had many, many of those moments.  I can think of a lot of extremely emotional experiences, particularly interviews, as we were talking about. The experience that always comes to mind, however, is that of shooting The Silence. Basically, he was very ambivalent about us filming him. He’d constantly cancel shoots. One day, he’d kind of had it and was in the mood to call everything off.  He said he just couldn’t have all of the distraction going on; he needed to get things done. He just needed to be there in his house. He told us that if it was just me who stayed and I didn’t say a word all day, we could stay there with the camera. I was incredibly intimidated, very respectful of who he was. He made you feel as if your speech was so superfluous; he thought people talked too much, like so many of my words were superfluous because he used words so carefully. He was so precise and rigorous. So I was left in house and I vowed not to talk all day and went into this place where I just moved around and filmed him doing what he was doing. I opened the door, went out into the backyard, filmed him from outside when I got too much of being around him [laughs]. I just kept moving around and doing my thing in complete silence. It was quite liberating. I’m obviously quite a talker!
I wanted to prove to him that I was smart. That mattered to me, you know, that Director should know that the cameraperson wasn’t dumb. To have him tell me what he needed from me, which was utter silence and for my presence to allow everything to happen for him, was revelatory. Can I ask you a question? Do you feel, in general, excited about what’s happening formally in documentaries right now?

S K: For the most part, I do. It’s a way of telling stories I’ve been fascinated by for a long time, even before I became a maker or started celebrating in rapturous prose all the incredible work I see.  I want to concentrate on people pushing the form in exciting ways, not the horror stories of elusive funding and how hard it is to make films and how we can monetize all this in some way. I’m bored by all that. I see too many instances where people make their films on their own terms using money they scraped together somewhere and made a beautiful, personal piece of work.
It’s interesting that in this particular form—in most creative endeavours, but particularly this one where you are investing years and years of your precious life and it’s hard to keep the mechanism going, and there’s so much mystery involved!—well, the most extraordinary people are drawn to do this. Documentary filmmakers are the most fascinating people to be around, they just are, mostly because the best ones tend not to be filmmakers. They’re coming at cinema from another vantage point; they’ve been out in the world and lived a bit, travelled, learned languages.  So yes, I have hope that the work of making non-fiction cinema is just going to get better and better and better if my reading of the pulse and vigour of this particular community here in Mumbai is anything to go by. The aesthetic imperatives are becoming something important to acknowledge and that’s a big leap, I think, and an important one.  
R J: Where we can take hope, on a certain level, is that there are many films that do exist where the craft is so strong, it cannot be denied.  I think we just have to keep speaking publicly, indulging in active discourse and honing our unique sensibilities.  But that aesthetic imperative should be more of a baseline.  I care about social justice as much as the next person; I’ve spent my entire adult life filming stories that push that agenda, right? But we have to be careful about these alliances we make that can, if we’re not careful, create literalism, reduce craft. I’ve seen it happen. A lot more of the funding is there for that than it is for other kinds of films.

S K: There definitely need to be more comedic docs.
R J:  I need to make more of them, too. The important thing is to allow for the surprises that happen in a story. A story isn’t necessarily “character-driven” if its main protagonist is chosen because he or she fits in a slot that serves the explication of the issue. And we don’t let people talk and tell their own story outside of the context of illustrating a problem, especially if they’re “problematic” people like criminals or terrorists. It’s always got to be in this context of explaining the political issues involved when, in fact, it could just be the weirdness of a certain person [laughs] and how they got to this obsessive place. That’s fascinating. There should be a space for films like that to be supported. Those kinds of things are very hard to predict in terms of outcomes.

S K: Well, we all live for the going-down-the-rabbit-hole episodes of our lives and that’s always what it is.
R J: It’s so important that we be surprised by what we find.

Further Reading: Rajeev Jain ICS WICA – Cinematographer – Director of Photography – DOP – http://www.rajeevjain.com/

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