Episode 03
Mere Focus Ki Love Story — Venkat Alexa
A companion essay to the two episodes recorded with Venkat Alexa. Twenty-two years of focus, eight hundred commercials, one new producer.
Watch Part 1 on YouTube
Watch Part 2 on YouTube
In the first week of May 2026, the Tamil Film Producers Council called a token strike. Producers stopped work for a day to say that the fees of actors and technicians had become unsustainable, and to demand that remuneration move toward a revenue-share model. Technicians answered that producers were not paying even the minimum on time. The week that argument was in the papers, a man sat down on the recliner of The Second Seat who has spent his working life on both ends of it. For more than two decades he was the technician whose payment arrived late or never. Today he is the producer who messages the union for the wage ledger of every craft before his shoot begins.
His name is P. Venkateshwara Rao. The industry calls him Venkat Alexa.
Alexa is not his surname. It is the name of a camera. When the ARRI Alexa came to India, the image of Indian cinema began to change. Light behaved differently. Skin recorded differently. Night recorded differently. And one of the first hands in the country to understand that new digital image belonged to Venkat, a focus puller from Hyderabad working out of Chennai. Set by set, take by take, camera by camera, the industry replaced his father’s name with the name of a German machine. He never corrected it. By the end of our conversation I understood why. The renaming was not an erasure. It was a record of work, the only kind of credit a first assistant cameraman usually gets, written into the one place no title card can reach: how people address you.
This essay sits beside the two episodes the way the research sat beside the recliner during the recording. The episodes are his voice. This is the homework, and the argument the homework kept making to me afterwards. The argument is the same one The Second Seat has been making since Episode One: recognition, not sympathy. Nobody on that recliner has ever asked to be pitied, and Venkat asked least of all. What he asked, in almost every answer, was that we understand what the work actually is. So that is what this essay tries to do.
01 · A Man Named After a Camera
To understand the name, you have to understand the machine, and to understand the machine you have to go back before it.
ARRI’s first serious attempts at digital cinematography were the Arriflex D-20 and D-21, cumbersome rental-only cameras that recorded high-definition video. The D-21 had no memory cards at all. It pushed its image out through cables into an external recorder, a deck loaded with cassettes, and by 2008 there were just fifty-six of these cameras at thirteen rental houses in the entire world. Venkat remembers the Indian end of this arithmetic from the inside: a camera body, two or three cables, a Sony recorder, a cassette that went straight from the set to the DI suite. The footage was 1920 by 1080. Not even 2K. That was the frontier.
Then, at IBC Amsterdam in September 2009, ARRI showed three wooden mock-ups of a new camera and gave it a woman’s name. The Alexa shipped in mid 2010, with a Super 35 sensor rated at 2.8K, the ability to record ProRes internally and uncompressed ARRIRAW to external Codex recorders, and a sensor so good that cinematographers still defend it fifteen years later. It is the camera that finally persuaded the holdouts of film to cross over. Robert Richardson took it onto Hugo. Roger Deakins followed a year later. And in Chennai, a rental house owner looked at the crates arriving from Germany and London and made an offer to his staff: the company will train whoever is interested.
Almost nobody was. Venkat told us why, and the reason is the most honest sentence about labour in either episode. The rental unit boys preferred to go on shoots, because shoots paid daily money and training paid nothing. He was an apprentice then, a third and fourth assistant, earning around four hundred rupees a day. The owner put it to him plainly: this is the next life. Learn it and you will get a life out of it.
What follows is a self-education story that should be taught at film schools, partly because it happened entirely outside one. He bought a laptop. He recharged data packs on his phone, four and five gigabytes at a time, in the years when 3G itself was a purchase you thought about. He taught himself the vocabulary of the new machine, resolution, dynamic range, depth of field, lens behaviour, and then carried his doubts to the most credible examiner available to a Chennai camera assistant of that era: Madhu Ambat. The timing of that examiner matters. Venkat frames the period through a pairing every southern technician of his generation would recognise: P.C. Sreeram was the cinematographer working with Mani Ratnam, and Madhu Ambat was the one who had gone further out, who had shot M. Night Shyamalan’s debut feature Praying with Anger in 1992 and later Wide Awake, one of the first Indian cinematographers to photograph a Hollywood production. When the ARRI technicians visited, Venkat noted down every line they said, took the notes to Madhu Ambat, and asked him to explain the differences. Cross-checking, he calls it. Every line, cross-checked.
Two months into the new cameras, P.C. Sreeram himself came to the rental house to inspect the operation, looked at what the apprentice had absorbed, and delivered the verdict Venkat repeated to us with visible delight: this guy is trained well, no need for the German or London person. The owner sent him out on ten commercials as a test. No complaints came back. He was made first assistant, told to train two others, and within months was the in-house instructor for every new camera arriving from London and Germany. By his own count, fifteen to twenty-five camera assistants passed through his hands, learning white balance, ISO, shutter, frame rates, timecode and sound sync, the entire grammar that film stock had never asked of them. His day rate moved from four hundred rupees to a few thousand. He never looked back at film. Two or three years as an apprentice and assistant on celluloid, he says, and then twenty-two unbroken years in digital. Digital is giving more life to me, he told us, and in his mouth the sentence is not a metaphor. It is an income statement.
The name arrived somewhere in this stretch, and the episodes let us date its logic precisely. Venkat’s account of Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2013 satire with Pankaj Kapur, Imran Khan and Anushka Sharma, is the account of a technology transfer. He remembers it as India’s first ARRIRAW feature, a first the public record gestures at but does not settle, shot at 2.8K when the Codex recorder unlocked raw recording on the Alexa, with the camera carried up from Chennai and ARRI’s own people from Germany staying on the set for the full sixty-day schedule. If any mistake happened, the protocol on that floor was three words long: Venkat will do. A German engineering company sent its camera into Hindi cinema and the human warranty on the package was a Telugu focus puller. After that, what else was the industry going to call him?
There is one more detail in this section of his life that I want to put on the record, because it captures how the man thinks. He did not stop at the camera. He sat in on DI sessions at the post house until he could supervise a grade himself. He sat beside lighting crews on sets where he had no lighting duties, because, as he put it, if you observe, at least fifty percent of the work you can learn easily. His theory of education is a theory of proximity: one month near one DOP gives you four or five points, ten DOPs in a year gives you fifty. You will not get this on Instagram, he said. It is on field only. Then he reached for the comparison that stayed with me longest. A two-year-old child does not learn words at home. You take the child out, and the child catches language one word at a time from the world. Same learning process here.
Venkat will do.
ARRI’s engineers, on the floor of Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, 2013
02 · The Mathematics of Five Feet
What does a focus puller actually do? The episodes contain the cleanest answer I have heard, and it is worth setting down before any of the stories, because every story depends on it.
The lens has a focus ring. The ring is marked in distances. The focus puller’s job is to know, at every instant of a moving shot, the exact distance between the lens and the thing that must stay sharp, and to turn the ring so that the marked distance and the real distance never disagree. That is the whole job, and it is unforgiving in a way almost nothing else on a set is. Colour can be corrected in the DI. A warm tungsten cast can be cooled in post. Framing can be cheated, but only because resolution bought the room, and the room is bought every morning. Once a shoot starts, the day’s resolution is fixed, and cinematographers fix it as high as the body allows, 4.5K, 5.6K, the Sony Venice 2 climbing to 8.6K, because maximum resolution is maximum forgiveness afterwards, in colour, in reframing, in everything the DI can reach. His teaching example was Eega, the film Hindi audiences met as Makkhi. Shoot the fly in HD, he said, and there is a fly there, that much will be known. Shoot it at 4K and above and you get the wing movement, the close-up with the eyes, jaan aa jaati hai. The price of that life is storage: a minute of HD weighs about three gigabytes, a minute of modern uncompressed raw runs past thirty. And focus is the exception to all this forgiveness. Focus cannot be fixed. What you captured on location, that exact sharpness, is all you will ever have. If focus is out, the only fix is to go back and shoot again, and on day ninety-one of a hundred-day schedule, with the light gone and the star’s dates finished, going back does not exist.
So Venkat watches actors the way nobody else in the cinema hall watches them. He told us this with a flatness that sounded almost like a vow. The artist is doing comedy, talking seriously, crying. For us it is not important. What is important is: five feet, seven feet, six feet. Is the face coming toward the camera or going away. Is it sharp or is it not. While the rest of the unit reads the performance, the focus puller reads the distance to the performance.
आप विराट कोहली हो, महेंद्र सिंह हो, रजनीकांत हो, शाहरुख़ ख़ान हो, हम लोगों का सम्बन्ध नहीं है। You are crying there, laughing, giving dialogue, हमको सम्बन्ध नहीं। मुझे focus perfect मिला कि नहीं, बस इतना है।
Venkat Alexa, on what the focus puller reads instead of the performance
Four of the largest names across two languages, flattened by the job into moving objects at five, six, seven feet. He does not queue for photographs between setups either, he told us, even when the whole unit does. I sit with my focus every hour, he said, and then produced the sentence this essay is named after.
ये जो मैं काम कर रहा हूँ, ये मेरे और मेरे focus की love story है। बस इतनी।
Venkat Alexa
Out of this arithmetic comes everything the audience experiences as cinema’s eye. When a frame holds a circle of friends outside a college and you know, without being told, which one is the hero, you know it because the focus told you. Shift focus, Venkat explained: who is the first preferable person to put the focus on, and who is not. The director narrates the scene, the focus puller maps the narration onto distances, and the audience’s eye goes exactly where the rack sends it. Recognition is literally manufactured at the focus ring. The hierarchy of a frame, who matters in it and who is texture, is executed by a man counting feet.
And it gets stranger, because the focus puller is also a silent participant in what we call a star’s aura. Venkat described the mechanics without a gram of mystification. The DOP watches the blocking and tells the artist: sir, if you come from here to here, the light will flare behind you. Sir, you look beautiful. A mark is set where the flare lands, because that flare looks like heroism. The focus puller readies his marks to that spot. The actor walks, the sun catches, the audience gasps. When I asked him where aura is made, by the actor, the audience, the director’s vision, he gave the only answer a technician would: it is made in the coordination. The screen is a meeting point, I suggested, between the people on one side making the image and the people on the other side believing it, and the aura lives in the middle, a conspiracy of both. Milibhagat was my word for it, a collusion, and an affectionate one. He did not object.
The one place he declined my frame was gender. I asked how the camera’s way of looking at women has changed across his two decades and more: the older grammar in which a heroine had to look like a heroine, lit apart from the world she stood in, against the newer effort, by image-makers like Ranjith and Murali Krishnan, to let a woman on screen look like she belongs to the community the story is about. It is the kind of question an eager guest absorbs and answers back in borrowed sociology. Venkat refused the loan. Society ki vajah se, he said, mujhe utna idea nahi hai. But there are changes happening. Pressed between a wedding scene from the nineties and one from today, the difference he would certify was lighting and equipment: the lights changed, film became digital, 2K climbed toward 8.5K, baaki poora same hai. For the lens, men, women and children are one subject. The lenses are the same, the exposure is one, and what shifts for a woman’s frame is skin tone work and lighting. There is a way to read this as evasion. I read it as the strictest honesty in the episodes: a technician marking the limits of his own authority, declining ideological credit for a changed gaze that he executed but did not author. The instructions come from elsewhere. What he would concede was the tempo of his trade, the only register in which he measures anything: every six months, update.
The marks themselves are a small anthropology of actors. Some performers, the experienced ones, the Naseeruddins and Shabanas and Pankaj Kapurs of his telling, take four pages of dialogue and land them in a single take, stopping on a coin. With them, you place your focus marks before they have even entered the shot, because their bodies are instruments that repeat. He was careful here, in a way I respected: I have not worked with all of them, he said, so I cannot speak beyond what I saw. Others have a rhythm that will not be told where to go. For them, the DOP quietly protects his boy: I will not give you full open, I will stop down one or two stops, take the depth and manage with general marks. Depth of field, in other words, is not only an aesthetic. It is an insurance policy one craftsman writes for another.
Which is why the most expensive object on a set can be hostage to the cheapest decision on a lens. Venkat offered a thought experiment he has clearly run on real floors. An art director builds a ten-crore set. The DOP opens the lens fully. The background dissolves into blur, and the ten crores, or a hundred, dissolve with it. Who knows this is happening, in the moment it is happening? The focus puller knows. On location, he said, the focus puller will know first. It is one of the quiet theses of these episodes: in the chain of image-making, the person most often described as junior is frequently the first sensor of error, for focus, for camera settings, for a frame rate that will flicker against a tube light. The hierarchy of the credits and the hierarchy of perception are two different maps.
He is equally unsentimental about the technology that was supposed to replace him. Autofocus cine lenses arrived. They failed. Follow-focus systems with a tracking sensor in the actor’s pocket arrived, and they fail the moment anyone crosses the frame, because the sensor faithfully racks to the interruption. By his account even Hollywood has bought only a couple of sets, while India releases fifty or sixty films every Friday, every one of them focused by hand. There is a larger conversation hiding behind that, about machines and the rest of his profession’s future, and it belongs at the end of this essay, where he put it himself.
03 · Father and Son
Every craft has a primary relationship, and the focus puller’s is with the cinematographer. Venkat named it before I could: father and son. If the focus is missed, the father gets beaten. The director does not stop to apportion blame within the camera department. He turns to the DOP, and the line Venkat quoted, with the timing of a man who has heard it more than once, is delivered like a complaint to a parent.
साब, तुम्हारा लड़का है, देख लो।
The director’s line, to the cinematographer, when focus slips
What makes the relationship live is that it runs on glances. A take is rolling. The DOP, eye at the viewfinder, keeps one corner of his attention on his focus puller’s hands. If something slips, no one shouts during the shot, because the director’s narration and the actor’s performance are sacred. The DOP and the focus puller talk with their eyes. A flick of a look: mistake. The answer travels back the same way: adjusting, done. The take ends, and only then, quietly, sorry sir, one more. Two men protecting an image and each other simultaneously, in silence, at twenty-four frames a second. If these both are syncing, Venkat said, the photography comes extraordinary. If they are not, the entire shoot goes out in mismatches and misunderstandings, and it does not matter who is standing behind them, Sanjay Leela Bhansali or anyone else.
He has had two fathers, and the episodes are partly a portrait of each.
The first is Madhu Ambat. FTII gold medallist of 1973, around two hundred and fifty films across nine languages, three National Awards for Best Cinematography, for G.V. Iyer’s Sanskrit Adi Shankaracharya in 1984, for Sringaram in 2006, and for Salim Ahamed’s Adaminte Makan Abu in 2010. Venkat worked nearly eight films with him, and the working method he described is a masterclass in how knowledge actually moves on an Indian set. It exists for a reason Venkat stated plainly, and the essay will not soften it into seniority. Madhu Ambat, he told us, is sixty-five now, and at thirty-five a paralysis took part of his leg and hand. He is not moving, in any functional sense, and has not been for half his working life. The chair beside the camera is not a senior man’s prerogative. It is the workstation of a craftsman whose body stopped cooperating at the midpoint of his career and whose eye never did. Three of his National Awards came after that chair. So the master kept the student beside him and used him as his hands. Venkat, change the white balance, I will tell you. Now change the frames. There is flicker in the tube light, put ninety-six and check. Shutter se control karo. The student turned the knobs, the master read the result, and every adjustment came with its reason attached. Venkat asked his questions in the gaps: sir, here you are using tungsten, here daylight, so the white balance changes how? The answers, he says, gave him a knowledge no manual carried. When the Malayalam industry had no digital cameras of its own in those early years, it was Venkat who travelled the kit from Chennai to Kerala for Madhu Ambat’s shoots. Fourteen Malayalam films sit in his ledger from that corridor, including, the shoot card reminds me, the Salim Ahamed and Mammootty films that grew out of the Adaminte Makan Abu partnership. He counts five films with Mammootty in all.
The second is Santosh Sivan, with whom he did fewer films but among them Thuppakki, the Vijay film whose every frame moves, the mass cinema end of his range. Venkat’s sketch of Santosh Sivan on a set is the sketch of a man who compresses: given three scenes of twelve shots each, he converts twelve into six, because he already knows which side to take the scene from, and the day finishes without the quality dropping. That, Venkat said, is the difference experience makes, the experience of having worked Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bombay and Hollywood floors and knowing what each one taught.
And then there is the film where his two fathers met, which the research surfaced rather than the recliner. Makaramanju, Lenin Rajendran’s 2011 Malayalam film about a passage in the life of the painter Raja Ravi Varma. The man cast to play Ravi Varma was Santosh Sivan, in his acting debut. The man photographing him was Madhu Ambat. One of India’s great cinematographers acting as the father of the modern Indian image, photographed by another of India’s great cinematographers, in a film about the very question these episodes circle: who makes the picture, and who gets remembered for it. Somewhere near that camera, on the focus, stood the student of both. Venkat mentioned the film in passing, one credit among credits. It is the kind of coincidence that is not a coincidence at all. It is what a life inside the image looks like from outside.
One more thing belongs in this section, because the father-and-son frame can hide it. The protection runs both ways, and it extends past the camera department. Venkat mapped a whole nervous system of mutual cover on a set. The gaffer protects the focus puller, because depth of field is built out of light, and when a shot is too hard the DOP’s solution is often a sentence to the gaffer: increase the light, cut the exposure, give him depth. The sound recordist protects the cinematographer, warning the camera attendants when an internal audio setting is going to shame the department in post. The generator operator, the man nobody in the audience has ever thought about, holds the flicker of every light on the location in his throttle hand; if he quietly saves diesel, the entire night’s footage strobes. There is an interlinking, Venkat said, generator, sound, camera, gaffer, focus puller, all of it depending on the cinematographer, and the cinematographer and director like father and son above them again. The set, in his description, is not a hierarchy. It is a family structure, with everything that word carries: protection, scolding, debts, and the absolute knowledge of who gets beaten first when something breaks. First the focus puller, he confirmed, laughing. Then the father.
04 · Fifty Kilos of Loban
When Kaali Khuhi released on Netflix in October 2020, the reviews agreed on exactly one thing. Film Companion opened by saying that fog plays a leading role in the film, rolling over the land like a silent witness from the night-time opening to the dawn of the last shot. High On Films called Sejal Shah’s cinematography the primary reason the film stays afloat. Critics who found the storytelling flat still surrendered to the look: the yawning dark spaces, the desolate Punjab night, the mist the girls walk through. Not one review I could find asked what the fog was made of.
Venkat was on that fog. Here is what it was made of.
Loban. Benzoin resin, the same material that smokes in temples and dargahs. The film, Terrie Samundra’s debut feature about a Punjab village cursed by its history of female infanticide, needed an entire village dark at night, a moon source behind, and mist for the girls to walk through, because girls in that village do not walk under street lights, they walk alone toward the forest. To build that mist, the unit burned, by Venkat’s count, fifty kilograms of loban every night, sourced continuously from four or five states, for thirty-five to forty nights, somewhere around sixteen hundred kilograms of temple resin across the schedule, burned to make a metaphor. Shoot from six in the evening to six in the morning. Pack up at six, and then wait two or three more hours for the haze to clear off the land, because the village had to give its air back before the day could use it. Every reviewer who praised the film’s atmosphere was praising, without knowing it, a supply chain.
The location sharpened everything. They were shooting in a village some thirty-five kilometres inside from Amritsar, in places barely a hundred or two hundred metres from the border fencing. The army briefed the unit on arrival, and Venkat repeated the briefing to us almost word for word: the villagers have ID cards and property across the fencing, they cross and return by evening, but you people are new, and if you go within a hundred metres of the fence and a bullet comes from the other side, that is the end, and it is no one’s concern. The film about a village’s buried violence was shot under a live instruction about lines you do not cross. Venkat noted, with the researcher’s respect one craftsman pays another, that the village and its subject were real, that the director was a woman born here who went to America young, heard the story, came back, researched it, took it directly to Netflix and brought the budget home herself. The public record matches him: Samundra grew up between a village in Punjab, a farming town in Missouri and coastal California, and shot the film near where she was raised. Picture is good, Venkat said, but it did not go. Even his disappointments are precise.
Now put the focus puller inside that fog. The DOP was Sejal Shah, Venkat’s boss of nine and a half years, a Mumbai ad-world veteran with hundreds of commercials behind him and features from London Dreams to Bodyguard to Bejoy Nambiar’s Solo, on which Venkat also worked. Venkat describes Shah’s style with the mixture of pride and suffering that defines the focus puller’s lot: he experiments constantly, and he uses no lights. No lights. Entire scenes at full open aperture, at night, in smoke, with a child actor and senior artists moving through a village. Full open means there is no depth of field to forgive you. The eye is sharp and the ear is already soft. Five to ten shots a night was the entire output, take after take, because at that aperture in that haze one focus slip kills the shot, and the mood that took an hour of resin to build cannot be ordered back for one more. Focus out one time in a difficult situation, Venkat said, khatam. Finished. Time and money depend on focus. People think focus is nothing, camera on, focus done. But it is not possible to adjust in post. There is no option. What you held on location is what the film has.
This is where the recognition argument stops being rhetoric and becomes physics. When we say a film is beautifully shot, we are usually crediting one name. The image of Kaali Khuhi that the critics loved is, at minimum, the resin burners hauling their fifty-kilo sacks across state lines, the gaffer building a moon, the generator man holding his cycles steady all night, the DOP refusing lights, and a focus puller keeping a ten-year-old sharp at full open in smoke a hundred metres from an international border. None of this diminishes Sejal Shah. Venkat would be the first to put the DOP at the head of the family, and he did, in so many words, when I pushed him on the National Award question. But the image is not protected by one person alone. That sentence is on the shoot card. After this episode it reads less like a thesis and more like a measurement.
There is a coda to the sensitivity question. The film’s subject was the killing of girls, and its lead was a girl, the young Riva Arora, with Shabana Azmi as the senior-most artist on the floor. I asked how the camera department carries a subject like that. His answer was technical first, because his answers are always technical first: light with mood effect, mist in the background, higher resolution and higher frame rates to build the feeling, time-taking process, shot perfect with the DOP. The fuller answer came when we talked about the children on that same call sheet, and it belongs in the next section, because it is bigger than one film.
05 · Children, Bears and Generators
Everything in Section 02, the marks, the pre-placed focus points, the choreography of distances, works because adult professionals repeat. Children do not repeat, and Venkat’s account of what the camera department does about it amounts to a quiet ethics. He spelled the protocol out when our conversation reached Kaali Khuhi, where the call sheet ran from Shabana Azmi, the senior-most artist on the floor, to a girl of ten or eleven, in dark scenes about dead girls. You cannot give a child marks. So you do not. You tell the child: jo aap khelna hai khelo, hum sambhalenge. Play whatever you want to play, stay in your zone, we will manage. You explain gently where the camera’s attention will be, you ask them to look out for the crew a little, and then the crew absorbs the entire technical burden the child has been excused from. I asked him to confirm what I thought I was hearing, that instead of pressuring a child toward the hundred percent, the crew deliberately takes the overload onto itself, and he confirmed it without hesitation: one hundred percent, because the night will stretch, one o’clock, two o’clock, and that pressure comes on us. It is the most humane sentence in the episodes and he delivered it as workflow. The marks system bends so the child does not have to.
It was not his first set built around a child. In 2013 he worked on Thanga Meenkal, the director Ram’s film about a father and his nine-year-old daughter, produced in part by Gautham Vasudev Menon, with Ram himself in the lead. The film won Best Tamil Film at the 61st National Awards, and its child lead, Sadhana, won the National Film Award for Best Child Artist, thanking Ram appa and Gautham Menon uncle and a row of other uncles in her acceptance message before going on, years later, to Peranbu. A focus puller’s filmography keeps its own private index, and in Venkat’s, two of the films that travelled furthest are films that asked his department to hold a child’s face steady without ever making the child carry the holding.
Around the children, the set itself keeps inventing problems, and the second half of this section is a catalogue of the ones Venkat has personally absorbed, because the texture matters more than any summary of it.
The lens fogs from air conditioning. A full-AC indoor set, a lunch break, and the next shot is dead for thirty or forty minutes because the front and back glass of the lens have bloomed with condensation, and you wait, reducing the AC, for the water film to leave. Cold outdoor locations, Kullu, Manali, Kashmir, do the same; heat only warms the camera body, which can be cooled, but cold fogs the glass, which can only be waited out.
The generator flickers. The lights you see as steady are a negotiation between the gaffer’s load calculation and the generator operator’s cycling, and if the operator trims the intensity to save diesel, the flicker arrives in the footage before anyone’s eye catches it on the floor.
The camera does not turn on. Venkat’s origin story of vigilance is a blast sequence from his apprentice days in Chennai: four cars rigged to explode, multiple cameras set, everyone ready, and one camera attendant who forgot to roll. The cars went up. The cut was called. The attendant said, sir, this take will be very good. The shoot was damaged, the cars were ash, and the lesson entered Venkat’s spine: check the equipment every second, because some shots, a blast, a bungee jump, do not offer a second take at any price.
The wildlife does not read call sheets. On a Thanga Meenkal song shoot in the forests of Wayanad, the unit climbed a hill and met a bear. Fifteen, twenty people on one side, one animal on the other, and the arithmetic of who manages whom settled itself. On Peraanmai, S. P. Jananathan’s 2009 forest film with Jayam Ravi, shot in the hills around Thekkady, they worked with real elephants at distance and a Hollywood Terminator on the call sheet: Roland Kickinger, the Austrian who wore the T-800’s body in Terminator Salvation, twenty days as the villain in the Kerala forests. The whole unit held silence around all of it, machine man and animals alike, because an elephant triggers, and an incident means the movie stops. On another Kerala village shoot, the unit filmed scenic frames of a settlement, only to be told at the edit table to look closer at what was growing in them. The location was a ganja village, already known to the police. A separate day, a different village, a reshoot. The image had to be relocated because the land inside it had a record.
I am listing these not as anecdotes but as a definition. This is what below-the-line means: the layer of the film where weather, diesel, animals, condensation, borders, narcotics and human forgetfulness are all live inputs, and where the job is to deliver, out the other side of all of it, a sharp frame that betrays none of it. When the frame succeeds, the audience sees mood. The crew sees the resin and the fuel gauge.
And the body keeps the minutes. A full camera setup runs to thirty or thirty-five kilos, easy enough on a studio floor, brutal on outdoor moves. Venkat has dislocated both shoulders across the years and reported it to us the way one reports mileage. The deeper exertion is mental, and he located it exactly: if there is a fight at home, money not sent, a quarrel in the mind, the doubt enters the hands and the focus goes. One focus out and a hundred people turn to look at who did it. Ninety days of a hundred-day schedule can pass without an error, and on the ninety-first day one shot goes soft and the director says into the mic, what are you watching, one more, and ninety days of izzat, of earned standing, go with it. His verdict on this is the plainest sentence in either episode.
हम लोग भगवान नहीं है।
Venkat Alexa, on the mistakes that come in any hundred-day schedule
Mistakes come, one hundred percent. What exists between the focus puller and the DOP, between the DOP and the director, between the director and the producer, is what exists between a wife and a husband: relationship, understanding, and adjustment. By day three of a fifty-day schedule, he says, the unit is a team, and even the artist accepts a sorry sir and goes again.
06 · Twenty Seconds and Two and a Half Hours
Here is a number that reorganises everything you think you know about who makes Indian images. For one day of work on a feature film, Venkat charges around four thousand rupees. For one day on an advertisement, around thirty thousand. When I asked him which he prefers, cinema or ads, he answered before the question finished: ads, ads, ads. And then, because he is constitutionally incapable of leaving a motive unexamined, he gave the full sentence: ads are for money. Movies are for name, so that the market knows this work, this film, this man. The honesty was so complete it took the air out of the usual art-versus-commerce conversation before we could have it.
His advertising life is its own filmography. Eight hundred to nine hundred commercials by his count, the show’s research putting the floor at eight hundred plus, across Kia, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Maruti Suzuki, Honda, Ashok Leyland, Mahindra, Tata, Toyota, the entire automotive shelf of the Indian market, much of it with Sejal Shah, whom he calls the master of cars, bikes and heavy trucks. Six ads with Dhoni. Eight to twelve with Virat Kohli. Tractor commercials with Yuvraj Singh in Punjab, where, he noted with a location scout’s appreciation, the houses are so genuinely grand that production designers have nothing to build and owners lend their farmhouses for shoots free. Six or seven ads with Ayushmann Khurrana. Ten to twelve flights a month, Delhi today, Jaipur tomorrow, Dehradun, Kullu, Kashmir, Kolkata, because his boss does ten to twelve ads a month and each one is a different state. I love moving, moving, moving, he said, the triple all his own, and the focus puller’s restlessness, trained on moving subjects for more than two decades, finally made biographical sense.
The scale of the form is invisible from the couch. He described a Mahindra XUV500 film shot in Jordan, near holy geography by his telling: horses brought in from Pakistan, performers brought in from Afghanistan, fifteen brand-new cars shipped from India, twelve of them damaged in eight days of shooting, something like eight crore rupees spent, two and a half minutes of finished footage, and a final television cut of twenty-two seconds. A feature buys two and a half hours of your attention with its budget; an ad buys twenty seconds, which is why, frame for frame, advertising is the most expensive image India makes. And the calibration has gone global under his feet. A Toyota shoot four months before our recording covered five of the company’s brands in six days, for distribution to seventy countries. Kia, manufacturing in India for five or six years now, sells into roughly seventy markets and sends its films along. The versions change with the passport: each country’s important artists are shot for each country’s cut, because, as he put it, the emotion changes too. A twenty-second commercial made in India is not one image. It is seventy calibrations of desire wearing the same car.
He stepped back to the wide shot exactly once in four hours, and it was here. The world’s highest count of film releases belongs to India, more than any country, including China, and China, he pointed out, is one country with one language. Here, travel five hundred kilometres and the language changes. He has worked in five of them. The ad world’s seventy-country precision and the cinema’s five-language sprawl are the same fact seen from two sides: there is no single Indian audience, only distances. He is a man trained to measure distance.
In an ad, he explained, the product is the hero and the frame is built backwards from it: the phone in the hand must hold focus, the face behind it negotiates for second place, the family on the sofa is lit and exposed so the warmth reads as real and not fake, and the focus goes where the money is. In a movie, the mood is the hero and everyone gets their close-up. Ads ka kaam alag hai, movie ka kaam alag hai, one hundred percent.
And yet the wall between the two is thinner than either side admits, and the episodes kept finding the doors in it. Historically, advertising is where digital cinema won India first. Venkat walked us through the economics from the inside: in the celluloid era, a big star’s ad shot on film, but a small ad, a snack packet with a new face, could not justify ten or fifteen cans of stock, so digital’s one-card, shoot-all-day promise cut a two-lakh stock day to twenty thousand and the small-budget ad film went digital en masse, years before features dared. The Alexa’s Indian beachhead was the thirty-second spot. The features followed the ads, which means the look of contemporary Indian cinema was beta-tested on shampoo.
The traffic runs the other way too. Sejal Shah’s no-lights experiments, refined across hundreds of commercials, walked into Kaali Khuhi intact. The desire machinery is shared: I put it to Venkat that an ad sells the product by selling the dream around it, and that cinema sells dreams too, that nobody buys the hero’s bungalow but everyone takes the sapna home, along with a thought, a relationship, an ideology, something carried out of the hall with the ticket stub. He met me halfway with a buyer’s anecdote: after a Kia Seltos shoot, his boss saw the car on location, liked it for his family, and bought one. You cannot buy the bungalow from the movie, he said. True. But the dream, I said, you can take. Sau percent, he said. One hundred percent. And his last word on the divide was the audience’s own body: the same person watches the ad and watches the cinema, in the same chair, often in the same sitting, since the ad arrives uninvited in the middle of the stream anyway. One human, one emotion, one story economy. The industry draws the line. The viewer never has.
On the nineteenth of February 2020, on the fifth day of the Chennai schedule of Indian 2, Shankar’s film with Kamal Haasan at EVP Film City, a crane collapsed during preparation for an action sequence. It killed three crew members: Krishna, an assistant director, Chandran, an art assistant, and Madhu, a production assistant. Nine more were injured. Kamal Haasan and Shankar escaped by metres, and Shankar tweeted that he felt it would have been better had the crane fallen on him. Lyca Productions announced two crore rupees for the dead and injured, Kamal Haasan one crore from his own side, Shankar another crore.
Venkat was not on that film. One of the dead was his friend, a man he had worked with in Chennai.
His summary of the event refuses both melodrama and comfort. It was an accident, he said, not a placement; nobody told them to stand there and dropped a crane. And then the sentence that reframes every safety conversation I have heard.
आज रात सोएगा तो कल सुबह उठेगा, guarantee नहीं है।
Venkat Alexa, after speaking about his friend
Our life has also become digital, he said, meaning fragile, meaning version-dependent, and the joke was so dark and so exact that neither of us followed it anywhere.
The conclusion he drew from his friend’s death was structural, not sentimental, and it is the reason this section stands alone. Compensation cannot resurrect. What a union does, layered under whatever a production pays, what it did in his telling with its own lakhs in cases like this, is smaller and larger at once: it is the body that reaches your family’s door and makes inquiries. In Mumbai, he said, there is no such certainty; tum kaun ho, mujhe maloom nahi. In the south, the union arrives. That difference, between a death and a disappearance, is what the next section is actually about.
08 · The Fifth Day
Start with what is owed. Venkat once worked seventy-six days on a production that owed him two lakh seventy thousand rupees. Twelve years have passed. The money has not come, and it will not, because the company has dissolved into changed phone numbers and an unknown address. He told us this without theatre, as a line item, and then told us the rest: payments saved toward a double-bedroom house in Hyderabad, fifty-seven to seventy lakhs of intention, still pending against vanished payers. The nature of the work, I said, is that you are often forced to forgive and keep working, and he agreed that it is painful, and then did the thing he does, which is pivot from the wound to the system that treats it.
The system is the union, and his testimony about it is the most granular I have recorded on this show. South Indian unions are strong, he said, and the structure explains why: one union per state, Hyderabad one, Chennai one, Kerala one, Karnataka one, so that membership is consolidated and a technician travelling between southern states carries the same protection and the same production discipline with him. Mumbai, by contrast, fragments into eight or ten bodies along linguistic and political lines, and the protection thins accordingly. The Film Employees Federation of South India, the umbrella his world answers to, federates its member craft unions, twenty-three by some public accounts, twenty-four by others, and counts its members in the tens of thousands. Venkat’s own number is twenty-four, and he holds documentary evidence for it, which will arrive in the next section as a photocopy in a producer’s hand.
He defends the union and audits it in the same breath. Rates revise once in three years, ten or twelve percent at a time, three thousand becoming thirty-three hundred or thirty-four hundred, while the market’s prices, he pointed out, rise every day. The floor protects and the floor lags. He has worked under that lag for more than two decades and is about to negotiate against it as a producer, and he still said, unprompted: I am not telling you this as a producer. Unions are needed.
What does the union actually do? On his own production, Venkat says, the union called him on the fifth day of the schedule. Four days are done, clear the payments on the fifth. His answer, every five days I clear, call my staff on the sixth evening, and if they are not paid, stop my shoot on the seventh, is the answer of a man showing off the system working, and he was entitled to show off, because the system’s teeth are real: bills checked with the crew behind the producer’s back, a shoot-stop power on day seven, and, in the other direction, an information network. Three thousand members of a craft union sit in the same WhatsApp groups, and when a production house does not pay, the group knows by evening: be alert, this house is not paying. A blacklist travels at the speed of a forward. Kerala runs the same machinery on a seven-day cycle, bills on the seventh day, a call by the ninth.
And then there is Kerala beyond its payment cycle, which he described less as a geography than as a working condition, and which is the passage I have thought about most since the recording. Unity very very good, he said, no ego issues, and the superlatives came without hedging: the best technicians from Kerala, the best cinematographers, the best editors, friends of his still cutting big pictures to this day. Fourteen of his films are Malayalam. The detail that reorganised my understanding of the phrase working conditions is this one. On a forty-day schedule, even if your house is on the next street from the location, the production gives you a hotel room for the duration. You are all in my control, the production’s logic runs, and the surface reading is discipline. The deeper reading is the opposite of control. A technician who goes home every night carries home back to the set every morning, a quarrel, an unpaid bill, a mood sitting in the mind, and Venkat had already told us, in Section 05, exactly what a domestic quarrel does to a focus puller’s hands. Kerala productions, in his telling, simply remove the variable. They take responsibility for the technician’s mind, not only his wage. The camera arrives mounted at your room; you come down, stand, ready sir. Mammootty and Mohanlal films finish in thirty to fifty days on a single schedule. The local public supports cinema one hundred percent, locations open easily, the controllers’ pressure stays low, and a low-budget film shot this way can collect across India. If this essay has a spine, working conditions before trophies, this paragraph is what the spine looks like standing up. Not a slogan. A hotel room across the street from your own house, booked so that your mind arrives at work as protected as your wage.
Then I asked the National Award question, the one on the shoot card. Cinematography is recognised at the National Awards through the cinematographer’s name, but the image is not made by one person. His first answer defended the father: the DOP is the main head, handling lights, light technicians, generators, camera boys, gaffers, focus pullers, even coordinating with sound, and if the award reaches him it reaches the family, the way, he said, ten crores reaching a husband is also the wife’s share. I pushed once: when the image on screen is good, the sound engineer who held the tone is a good technician, the camera attendant who set the right internal resolution is a good technician, the gaffer is a good technician, and how many of them does anyone see? He absorbed it and re-balanced rather than retreated: when did I say the DOP is not important, but behind the DOP five people went, and all of them are important behind that image. It is the correct answer, and it is this show’s answer, reached from the other side of the camera.
And here the essay owes the reader a seam. The most quotable formulation in these episodes, working conditions before trophies, wages before applause, was not delivered by Venkat in a single speech. It was built across the recliner, and most of the bricks were mine. I was the one who laid the list out: is my money coming on time, is my working environment free of fear, do I have equipment, how much support do I have, from the crew, from the set, from the officials, how well am I able to work. Venkat assented, support hai toh, and then made the argument his own in the only register he fully trusts, the market’s. The technology failed, he said, so the focus puller has value. There is demand and there are not enough people, because fifty shots a day from morning to evening need an experienced hand, the experienced hand costs real money, and the patience that builds one has thinned. The thesis of this section is a joint construction: the interviewer articulating, the technician ratifying it and then re-pricing it. I am leaving the seam visible, because an essay about credit should not launder its own.
09 · The Producer Who Holds the Ledger
More than two decades after the rental-house owner told an apprentice that the new camera was his next life, the apprentice is producing a film. By the time we recorded, he had shot twenty-six or twenty-seven days, generated forty-eight terabytes of footage, and was two or three months from release, at which point, he said with a producer’s new modesty, he will finally learn what distribution is. The transition is the spine of the second episode, and what makes it worth an essay is that he is not transitioning away from his craft. He is weaponising it.
Watch what more than two decades of the second seat do to a production office. A new producer, in Venkat’s telling, is a man who gets a chair, a fan, coffee, biscuits and a quotation: a camera that rents for a certain price is offered to him at sixty thousand, because he does not know. Venkat knows. I know the per-day rent, he said, and you know the human value also. The phrase stopped me. Human value. He meant it literally, as a rate: what a technician’s day is actually worth, what this one is to be paid and what that one, and he knows it because he messaged the union as a producer and asked for the workers’ wage list, and the ledger of all twenty-four crafts came back to him. He takes the photocopy in hand and goes man by man. You are the sound engineer, your union rate is this much, what extra are you using, okay, done. There is no wastage money, he said. Whatever budget I planned, I will get it in that budget. The same union rate card that once protected him as a worker now disciplines him as a producer, and he submits to it from both directions at once, which may be the only genuinely new model of an ethical producer I have heard described on this show: not a man promising kindness, but a man who cannot be overcharged and will not underpay, because he has personally been every line of the ledger.
The craft knowledge runs through everything. He knows what a DOP shoots and what an editor keeps, so he can read a script in shots. He knows what the DI costs and which colorist’s filmography is worth the rate. He knows that one accurate camera booking saves a lakh of posturing. He tested the script the way he tests equipment: heard the subject, liked thirty percent, demanded the full screenplay, sat with it for three or four days scene by scene and dialogue by dialogue, and then ran the most honest focus group available to any producer, his wife and her parents and his own family, general audiences all, cross-checking whether it touched them. The on-location experience of twenty-plus years, he said, is being used here, and the audience will also understand. I believe him on the first claim and the industry will adjudicate the second in a few months.
What kind of producer will he refuse to become? He answered with the payment rhythm before anything else: pay perfectly, weekly, time to time, and the workers will not leave you. He has seen the other kind, the few who delay and torture, and he has been on the receiving end of them for a house’s worth of unpaid lakhs. He also answered with the thing producers never say on the record: the prevention is cheaper than the penance. Control the technicians’ budget through the union ledger and the budget controls itself, and the first copy releases inside the plan.
And then the conversation arrived where The Second Seat always arrives, at the chair beside the chair. Across this whole journey, I asked, the frustration and the strong days, who kept you motivated, who has been your second seat in life? Meri wife hai na, he said, before the question had fully landed. The arrangement he described is a division of focus: whatever problem comes, from her side of the family or his, she absorbs it, tum tumhara kaam dekh lo, trust, karo, main hoon, from the background. He sat with that for a second and then produced, unprompted, the line that gave the episode its heart.
I think she is my focus puller.
Venkat Alexa, on his wife
The room laughed and then went quiet in the same breath, because the metaphor is perfect in a way he had spent four hours teaching us to verify. The focus puller is the person who watches the distance so you can watch the performance. The one who absorbs the technical burden so the artist can stay in the zone. The first to know when something is going soft, and the one who corrects it with a glance, without stopping the take. He had described his wife’s job and his own job in the same sentence and they turned out to be the same job. The figure is an old one, the wife absorbing in the background so the man can work, but in his cosmology the focus puller is not the support act, it is the first to know and the hardest to replace, and he gave her the highest title he has.
His advice to the next generation came wrapped in a father’s bluntness: keep your principles, no daaru, no cards, no drugs, no wandering, finish the work and go straight home, and your family’s trust becomes your capacity, because a boy whose parents can say whatever you do, we support you, can do anything. Friends will test you for four or five years, he said, and then leave you alone once they learn ye aisa wala nahi hai. Seventy percent of the industry, by his own estimate, goes the other way, and he has watched it happen beside him. After forty, he added, BP and sugar come free anyway. The room laughed again. The advice stands.
At the end, we asked him to sign the show’s reel, to leave whatever the conversation or the life had taught him. He wrote one line.
Believe your family. They will give the second seat.
Venkat Alexa, signed on the reel
Coda · What Is Sharp and What Is Blur
Every episode of this show is built on one structural idea: cinema does not become legible from a single seat. You have to go sit beside the person who was closest to the part of it you want to understand. With Venkat Alexa, the part was the image itself, the literal sharpness of everything Indian audiences have watched for more than two decades, held steady through smoke and borders and bears and unpaid invoices by a man counting feet.
The conversation kept returning to a single physical fact, and I want to end on it because it is also a moral fact. Focus cannot be fixed in post. Colour can. Framing can. Sound can be dubbed, performances can be trimmed, whole subplots can be saved on the editing table. Focus is the one element of the image that exists only in the present tense, decided irreversibly in the moment of its making, by a person whose name the credits compress into a line nobody reads. Everything this show believes is contained in that asymmetry. The industry’s memory, like its post-production, is endlessly correctable. The work itself happened once, live, on location, and was either held sharp or lost.
The conversation about artificial intelligence belongs here, against that asymmetry, because that is where it kept pointing anyway. I quoted Javed Akhtar’s argument about writers: bring all the AI you want, it cannot match a poem, because it has never had its heart broken, never sat before a guru, never been corrected, never faced rejection, never cried, never felt the first joy of getting something right, and all of that human feeling is what enters craft. Venkat accepted the point and refused its comfort in the same breath. You are correct, madam, he said, but if that technology comes, the form will change. And where my argument was lyrical, his prediction was concrete. You will need to transform, from focus puller to camera, toward the operator’s and the cinematographer’s work. That work will be available. This focus puller’s work will not. He has watched autofocus fail on every set it has visited, and he is still not betting his successors’ careers on its failure. It was the least romantic sentence in four hours of recording, and it came from the man with the most to lose by saying it, delivered with the same steadiness as his answer to the Alexa in 2010: when the next machine comes, be the first person who learns it.
P. Venkateshwara Rao held the present tense sharp for more than two decades, across five languages, eight-hundred-odd commercials and a filmography that runs from Thuppakki to Pathemari to a fog-soaked village a hundred metres from the fence. The industry paid him the strangest compliment it had available: it gave him the machine’s name, because the machine was the biggest thing it had recently learned to trust, and he was the man who taught it the machine. Now he is producing, with the union’s rate card in one hand and two decades and more of human value in the other, and the most interesting question in Indian cinema this season is a small one. When the first copy of his film releases, somewhere in it there will be a shot where the focus does something quiet and exact, and almost no one watching is going to know why it feels right.
We will.
By Darshim Saxena · All Episodes