AR Rahman: ‘Wrong movies are being sent for Oscars’

Two-time Academy Award winner AR Rahman got candid with another music legend L Subramaniam in a conversation that’s out on the former’s YouTube channel. 

There AR Rahman has said that India often sends the wrong films to the Oscars. He further added that there is a need to understand the tastes of the western audience .The music maestro has now said that India often sends the wrong films to the Oscars. This results in them failing to secure nominations. He further added that there is a need to understand the tastes of the western audience to succeed on this front.

When Subramaniam asked how he changed the old way of composing music with a lot of musicians and the whole orchestra, Rahman said that it was due to the advancement in technology. “Back then they had only eight tracks for a film, since I came from a jingles background I had 16 tracks, and I could do a lot with it. It’s just that nobody thought about it. Everyone wanted depth and the orchestra was costly, but all the big instruments became smaller. So, I came in the transitional period of technological change. It gave me a lot of time to experiment and fail. Nobody knew my failure, they only saw my success because it all happened inside the studio. We kept coming back again and doing it. So, the freedom I got because of having a home studio,” the composer said.

Rahman had told musician L Subramaniam, “Sometimes, I see that our movies go till the Oscar… they don’t get it. Wrong movies are being sent for the Oscars. And I am just like DON’T. We have to be in another person’s shoes. I have to be in Westerner’s shoes to see what’s happening here. I have to be in 

my shoes to see what they are doing.”

Rahman was nominated once again for Best Original Score and Best Original Song for Danny Boyle's 127 Hours. This year, the composer has scored music on Rajkumar Santoshi's Gandhi Godse – Ek Yudh. He also has Mani Ratnam's Tamil sequel saga Ponniyin Selvan 2, as well as the Hindi films Maidaan and Pippa coming out this year.