As I placed my phone in front of Resul Pookutty, I anticipated a question about the quality of its recording app. Instead, I got a gesture: he silently moved the phone a couple of inches closer to him. The master of sound should know the ideal recording distance; any worry I had of not getting a clean recording was instantly gone. In fact, it was the best recording I ever got.

We were seated at the Club lounge of the Grand Hyatt at Bolgatty Island, Kochi. Its tranquil and silent interiors are ideal for anyone planning to get away from the din of the bustling city, especially a man who deals with various sounds in the closed confines of his studio. Resul orders a glass of piping hot water to soothe his sore throat, an after-effect of the long drive he made from his hometown Vilakupara, Kollam to Kochi.

I start with his work in the upcoming VK Prakash film Praana, which has employed a modified version of sync sound called ‘surround sync sound’. Nithya Menen is the only actor in the film which will be released, on Jan 18, in four languages. PC Sreeram has shot the film.

What is surround sync and why was it used on Praana?
This film is essentially about a woman trapped in this huge mansion where she knowingly gets into. This place becomes the secondary character. If you take any haunted house film, the house has a character of its own. When I heard the story, I asked myself how I can make this location—with just one character interacting with the camera—alive. That can happen only if there is some texture. So I suggested doing sync sound in surround. I had tried and tested this before in some other films, and I found it to be extremely interesting. This requires lots of microphones to be set up. 

WATCH PRANAA TRAILER

As we have to take into account the changes in ambient sounds and time of day, we had to ensure that the scenes were shot in chronological order. Everything had to be consistent. In a regular sync sound, dialogues are recorded. In surround sync, everything else apart from the dialogues, i.e. ambient sounds, is recorded. This is achieved with the help of multiple microphones—mono or stereo. Sometimes you have to do that for the entire house and we do live mixing as the shoot is going on.

The whole thing sounds quite complicated.
No, the complication is when you don’t plant enough microphones. And even if you had, you have to use them the right way in post-production. Before the shoot began, I made location visits a couple of times to figure out what happens in each scene. If five microphones are placed in five different distances, the same sound is not captured the same way in all of them. It’s what we call ‘phase differences’. We need to keep correcting these phase differences between each and every spoken word and also each and every activity. This is a tedious process, especially when you have stereo microphones involved. And doing the same thing for four different languages—Malayalam, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu—is not a joke, I tell you. Initially, we thought we were doing one small film but when it came to post-production, it felt like doing four separate films.

Are you of the opinion that more filmmakers should use sync sound?
Absolutely. It should be made part of our filmmaking process. First of all, the actors are not there to mime; they’re there to act, and sync sound makes everything look authentic. Some actors think they can improve it in dubbing, but I don’t see any improvement. They say what is lost in translation is the original itself. That’s exactly what I want to say about not using sync sound. You cannot recreate the truth of a particular moment in the studio later. Look at some of the recent Malayalam films starring Fahadh Faasil. They have used sync sound and you can clearly see its pros.

But many filmmakers in our country find the use of sync sound challenging—they have to control the set, crowds, and whatnot.

That happens when there is no proper planning. Taking that extra effort is a good thing, no? This non-planning is visible in our filmmaking and in the way we conduct business. This is the difference between us and the West. When the West has turned the entertainment industry into a multi-million dollar business, we think a 100-crore is such a big deal. I think we killed the business the day we started putting out the ‘100-crore club’ ad. We destroyed the good intentions behind the filmmaking process. I hate the guy who started the ‘100-crore club’. He did it for his mileage, but in the process, he destroyed the sanctity of the filmmaking business.

I’ve heard from a couple of filmmakers that some actors here are not involved in every step of the filmmaking process.

I don’t like to encourage that style of filmmaking. I’m not used to that. I expect an actor to be part of each and every damn thing. Everyone involved in a film has to work as a unit. When I’m investing so much of my time and energy in a film, they better take my work seriously. Recently, I was shocked after I learned that the director of a film I was supposed to be part of, refused to give the script to the actor. I asked, “You don’t want to give your lead actor the script?” and he said, “I’ll explain everything to him on location.” Things are not the same anymore. The current crop of actors and filmmakers, whom others mockingly call ‘new gen’, are serious about what they do. They have got the business sense right, and that is why they’re doing so well.

Has there been an instance where your work didn’t show up exactly the way you wanted on the screen?
That happened during the release of Enthiran. The system failed during a screening in Mumbai for the entire film industry—everyone from Amitabh Bachchan to Aamir Khan was present. Before the screening, I found the configuration erroneous. The screening got delayed for half an hour. Aamir came and asked me what was wrong and I said the system was going to fail—if not in the first reel, then the next or the one after that. And guess what happened? The system failed just 40 mins before the climax.

What’s the one sound that annoys you while watching a film—is it a baby crying, or someone munching their chips, or someone talking on the phone?
The phone. It’s so disrespectful. Why can’t you keep it on silent? And in case you get an urgent call, why can’t you take it outside? Nobody is stopping you. Why scream on the phone when a movie is going on? Show some decency, man.