As I wait for Ashok Amritraj at his parents’ residence at Chesney Lane, off Ethiraj Salai, I take time to look at all the memorabilia hanging on the walls of the living room: there’s plenty from the tennis days with him and his brothers, on courts, with trophies; there are also the customary family shots and pictures of the next generation. On the bottom left, there’s a huge photo of Amritraj in his Hollywood producer avatar, smiling at a very happy Dustin Hoffman. He arrives, brisk as ever at 60, with a wide smile, and greets me with a welcoming baritone.
He’s here in Chennai for two reasons. He enters the sexagenarian club, while his mother Margaret Amritraj is turning 90. “In fact, it’s more special for my mom than it is for me. I am here to celebrate with the rest of the family.” The second reason can be seen right up there with the rest of the framed pictures, way above everything else to be precise. A certificate from the United Nations declaring his appointment as a goodwill ambassador in India — the first one — for their Sustainable Development Goals programme.
“I’ve been so lucky to have had two careers: first in tennis, travelling with my brothers around the world, and then becoming an overnight star in Hollywood. Now, I’m probably the only film producer in the world to have been given this honour (at the U.N.), and I hope I’m able to live up to the expectations.”
Working with the U.N. and promoting their causes of eradicating illiteracy, hunger and poverty has a lot to do with creating awareness and instilling values. Amritraj says his own sense of responsibility came to him through his parents’ upbringing, his schooling in Chennai and his unwavering religious faith.
Amritraj says his philanthropic side is something he explored greatly over the last decade or so with his wife, be it contributing to the upkeep of the Velankanni Church or donating to the Little Sisters of the Poor in Chennai, or doing his bit for the Motion Picture & Television Fund to help the film industry in the U.S. And it was about three or four years ago that he received a call from the United Nations and got into talks about how the medium of film can be used to influence and bring about change.
Already well over three decades into Hollywood, with over 100 films and a gross revenue of $2 billion, Amritraj says he conceptualised a television show, supported by the U.N. and Variety magazine, called Chance Of A Lifetime . “We brought young filmmakers from around the world: Singapore, the Middle East, India — two boys and two girls from each country — and clubbed them into teams representing the Millennium Development Goals of the U.N. I hosted it like a reality show, and my director friends like Santosh Sivan, Ketan Mehta and Nagesh Kukunoor helped out as judges.” The winning shorts eventually made it to Cannes and then to the U.N. for screening. “And from there, we started talking about a larger relationship… that’s how this came about.”
The United Nations’ trend of partnering with Hollywood stars for a greater cause is well-known. Just last year, they coupled the weight of Oscar-winner Leonardo DiCaprio with the technical expertise of National Geographic Films (whose former CEO Amritraj was) to present a hard-hitting film on climate change, Before the Flood . I ask him what he thought about it. “Terrific,” he says. “Leo does a fantastic job as an ambassador (for climate change). That’s the kind of support that makes the difference.”
And these are the sort of films that manage to pack a lot of emotion into their scripts, a key ingredient Amritraj looks for in whatever piece of writing he receives as a pitch. Ever since he got into the movie industry in the 1980s. “That was a time when it (Hollywood) was just a sea of white people,” he says. “It wasn’t the easiest task to take on. By 1992, I became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Today, it’s much easier to get into that circle, because a lot of it is about gender and race.” This is a topic Amritraj has written about in great detail in his autobiography, Advantage Hollywood , and said, during its launch in 2013, that he would like to see more young Indians take a shot at what he did. “Back then, a white studio executive told me he loved India and then asked where in the country was Singapore located,” Amritraj says with a chuckle. “Today, it’s more of a global village that is colour blind. There are so many Indians on TV shows and there is an acceptability of your skin colour on screen. A lot of it has to do with the Internet. You see Indians doing well in all walks of life. We’re just behind in the entertainment space.”
Amritraj also mentioned that he’d be willing to work with any Indian film talent as long as they offered substantial content. Has he found anything to match his yardstick? “Well, this young man Vetrimaaran did come to my house in L.A. last year to show me his film, Visaaranai (it was India’s official Oscar entry for 2017). All I was told was that I wasn’t going to relax very much! I thought it was a very gripping film; it’s unfortunate it didn’t make the cut (at the Oscars),” says Amritraj.
He has a lot of Indian directors coming to him with pitches, but very few writers, unlike how it’s usually done in the U.S. “My focus has been on finding a piece of material that would suit a TV series on Netflix or Amazon. I think Indian stories can be told better in eight hours (in segments) than in 90 minutes.”
He admits that he’s not followed the Tamil cinema industry very closely. The last film Amritraj remembers seeing in Chennai was at Sathyam Cinemas, on the owner’s invitation. “I can’t remember what it exactly was but the crowd was going crazy,” he says. A proper masala film probably, featuring a big hero, I tell him. “Probably,” he says. “I think the stars here are some of the smarter ones in the world because they know how to please their audiences. And that’s how they stay around for so long, be it Amitabh Bachchan or Rajinikanth. They’ve aged but they have sustained themselves.”
The last tryst he had with a proper Indian film was right here in Kollywood nearly 20 years ago. Jeans , starring Prashanth and newbie Aishwarya Rai also happened to be India’s official Oscar entry in 1998. Amritraj had shared a ‘throwback thursday’ photo of the film’s muhurtam on his Twitter account recently. “It happened around Gemini (flyover) and it was pouring,” he says, and clarifies that the cast and crew were actually soaked in rain and not sweat. “Shankar was three films old and he was definitely talented. You clearly saw that his movies had a point of view, which I think is very important for a director. I was already involved in a TV serial production — Marma Desam — when he came to me with his script for Jeans . His first choice for the cast was Aishwarya, who had recently won the Miss World title.” Rai couldn’t sign any contract for a year as a rule, and so Amritraj had to wait for a while before negotiations began. “That was the first time I ever negotiated with a female actor.” Rai had also simultaneously signed up for Mani Ratnam’s Iruvar, which eventually ended up releasing first, and became her onscreen debut. “We had a lot of visual effects to finish with Jeans. ” It was the most expensive Indian film to be released back then, with a budget of nearly Rs. 20 crore.
So what does he think about the very same Shankar who’s been producing films for nearly Rs. 200 crore and above ( 2.0 is reportedly being produced at double that amount)? “Unbelievable. What can I say, except... inflation,” he laughs. “It’s Rajinikanth and Shankar, he likes to do these larger-than-life films. And that’s a wonderful thing,” he says.
