With Monica, O My Darling, Sonawane decided to try a little experiment, reusing the exact lenses he had used to shoot Badhaai Do — a film different in mood and tonality. “Usually, I choose the lens according to the film. This time, I wanted to see whether I could still create a different feeling with the same lens.”
Sonawane’s initial thoughts that Badhaai Do would be the “easiest film to do” and the best film to return to work with post-pandemic were challenged during the pre-production process. “It turned out to be the most prepped film for me ever,” he says, with amusement. “(Director) Harshwardhan Kulkarni’s process was to go through each and every page, every paragraph. We went to every location multiple times to block our scenes. I have never had a director so involved in everything, including the color-grading stage during post-production.” It was a novel way of working for the cinematographer, who didn’t have a bound script for Angry Indian Goddesses and didn’t always know where the actors would walk or where they would sit. Badhaai Do, by contrast, had scenes that sometimes required 30 takes. “My intention was to be invisible. I tried to remove myself and disappear,” he adds.
The cinematographer’s homework doesn’t begin when he is sent a script, but is a continuous process he hones when he isn’t shooting. In his spare time, he watches films, reads books about them and studies paintings and photography, confident that all of this knowledge will eventually come in handy when he’s on set. “Image references inspire me, even if they usually have nothing to do with the film,” he says. During Newton, when the crew was shooting in a remote area of Chhattisgarh, he put up 100 to 150 black-and-white photographs taken by Andre Kertesz, Sebastiao Salgado, and Josef Koudelka. “The feeling that these images evoked were inspirational,” he says.
Among the cinematographer’s inspirations are Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski, director Achal Mishra and his cinematographer Anand Bansal, and filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane.
