Rathindran on his directorial debut

Making it big without completing high school and a college education is not easy.
However, R Rathindran Prasad is one of those people who always knew what they wanted to do. CT caught up with the passionate man, who worked as an associate director in the Tamil hit flick Kalavani, and is all set to make his debut as main director in a feature film...
He claims that right from the age of five he has been interested in directing.“I remember watching the making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video, and thinking that the director of the music video was better than Michael, because he created such an awesome video,” he says. This inspiration led him to watch more videos chronicling the making of music videos and films. In school, he was considered a bad student, and was always pulled up for lack of discipline (even though his mother was the vice-principal !) .
However, he excelled at multimedia design and so, after he was expelled from school, joined a design firm. That was when he was merely 16. He started off as a photoshop person but within a couple of months, he successfully landed the position of creative director of the company.
“The position I started at was the lowest in the company, and then I got the highest position in the company in just two months — my starting salary was 1500, and it jumped to 8000, he reminisces . However, he soon reached his saturation point and was an adfilm maker for three-and-half years. After this stint, he moved to Mumbai for six months to make documentaries and assist ad filmmakers.
Last year was especially fruitful for the director, as he worked on the hit Kalavani as an associate director and even took his skills to Germany, where he was invited to do a surrealist production of the famous play Frühlings Erwachen. “For my work on the play, I received critical acclaim and coverage by the German media. One German critic even went so far as to say that I had redefined his idea of a Bollywood filmmaker ,” he smiles, “Now, I am set to make my debut in feature films as a director. It is a bilingual production (Tamil and Telugu) which will go on the floors in August.”
From being a young kid inspired by Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, to a talented director who now counts Akira Kurosawa as his guru, Rathindran sure has come a long way!
(Contributed by Sushanth Shyamsundar)