BIRTHDAY SPECIAL :: 15 Facts on Legendary Director Maniratnam
Works of Maniratnam — Each Movie is a Masterpiece !
• Mani Ratnam's Original Name is Gopal Ratnam Subramaniam Iyer
• He is a Pure Vegetarian and he still never even eats 'Egg'
• He is a Tamilian, but he made his debut in Kannada movie. His debut movie was Pallavi Anupallavi and the movie featured Anil Kapoor (Father of Sonam Kapoor) and Lakshmi.
• Legendary Director Balu Mahendra was the cinematographer for Pallavi Anupallavi. He agreed to do cinematography even though Maniratnam had no previous experience.
• He initially had association with Ilayaraja and the duo gave some combination movies like Nayagan, Thalapathi, Anjali, Mouna Ragam. Interestingly, Ilayaraja also celebrates his birthday today !
• Maniratnam introduced 'Musical Sensation' A.R.Rahman to the world through Roja and he broke his association with Ilayaraja
• He often preferred to work with top level technicians such as P C Sreeram, Rajeev Menon, Sreekar Prasad, Santosh Sivan, Ravi K Chandran, Ram Gopal Varma etc.
• He has directed 4 Indian Languages Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Hindi
• Mani Ratnam’s movie Nayagan was featured one among the TIME Magazine’s 100 All time greatest movies
• 'Roja' was the only Indian movie to get featured on TIME Magazine's 10 Best Sound Tracks of all time.
• He has 6 National Awards, 9 Filmfare awards, 12 International Film awards and so on.
• Maniratnam was the one who brought 'World Beauty' Aishwarya Rai to movies through the movie 'Iruvar'
• Unlike the rest of the directors, Mani Ratnam doesn’t enact and show the scenes. Instead he gives the scenes to the actors and asks them to do on their own.
• So far Mani Ratnam has never shot a single frame outside India. Only 'Guru' was shot in Turkey and Istanbul as per story's demand.
• Maniratnam always have a special love towards RAIN and TRAIN