The DOP is almost always up at 4am with his camera ready for his day to begin. “I never think cinematography is my profession. I was once shooting in Serbia at minus 10° early in the morning, waiting to capture that one particular light. We would come to Rajasthan to shoot at 45° and then to Chennai in the peak summer. Sometimes, there is a thunderstorm and sometimes, it’s hard to go up the terrain. But these things keep you alive, excited and sharper. If I think this is my job, I’ll get bored. So, it’s like somebody is paying me money to play with all these tools and I’m just using my eyes to see through the lens.”
Even when he was young, Ravi remembers looking at the camera as a toy to play with. His brother, the famous cinematographer K Ramachandra Babu was already in college when Ravi was born. So he would often accompany his brother as a model, roaming around the village, clicking pictures. “When I used to click pictures of friends and families, they would say it looked different. It led me to realise that I had some good composition or lighting sense.”
While cameras have always been his dear friend, he remembers realising the power of cinema while watching Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) for the first time in Chennai’s Devi theatre. “Watching the film on a 70mm screen blew my mind. For me, cinema is not about a single part like cinematography or editing, it is a whole. This film took me to a different world.” Having started his career in 1991 with the Malayalam film Kilukkampetti, Ravi is quick to point out that Malayalam cinema has always been ready to take a gamble on young cinematographers. “Be it Santhosh Sivan, Balu Mahendra, Ravi Varman and others back in the day or the recent DOPs like Shaji Khalid in Manjummel Boys and Jomon T.John, the South has seen many talented cinematographers.”
