‘Hariharan saved my song from Rahman’:
Vairamuthu
November 10, 2008
The
press meet of Saran’s directorial
venture Modhi Vilayaadu was held on
Saturday evening at the Green Park
hotel in Chennai. The movie has
Vinay
and Kajal Aggarwal in the lead.
Nearly
60% of shooting has been completed.
The movie will mark the return of
Saran after quite a gap. His last
film was Vattaram which could
not do much at the box office. Following
that he went through a bad phase where he
says, many people took advantage and
cheated
him. Speaking at the function, he said
that
the tough times had taught him the true
colors of a few people and that the
lessons
he had learnt had transformed him. He
claimed
that we would all see a new Saran in
Modhi
Vilayadu and that his career will be
remembered
in two phases, pre-Modhi Vilayaadu and
post-Modhi
Vilayadu.
Vairamuthu was also present at the
function
and spoke in an uncharacteristic manner,
ruffling a few feathers. First he hailed
the debut of singer Hariharan and Leslie
Lewis (the colonial cousins) as
composers.
He then went on to describe in a
metaphoric
way how it was to work with different
people.
He said that some people literally
squeezed
his work out of him like sugarcane juice
extractors while there were others who
came
like honeybees and took what they needed
without causing much hurt. He recalled
that
for the film Ratchagan (Nagarjuna,
Sushmitha
Sen), he had written the ‘Armstrong’
song and that Rahman was not at all happy
with the ‘Armstrong’ word as
he thought it to be too hard which he
felt
would spoil the melody of his tune. Even
after trying a lot, he was not convinced
and wanted the word changed. It was then
that Hariharan (who went on to sing the
song) intervened and said that the word
was indeed quite good. Vairamuthu pointed
out that this upset Rahman quite a bit.
He thinks that it was Hariharan’s
timely intervention that saved his work
from being fiddled with. He finished off
by saying that in Hariharan and Leslie he
was able to see elements of the great
Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy
combination and wished them all the best.
http://www.behindwoods.com/tamil-movie-news-1/nov-08-02/vairamuthu-10-11-08.html
