Satyajit Ray

If someone were to ask me why I make films, I wouldn't find it easy to answer. Not because there aren't any good and right reasons for my making them, but because there are so many.

I think the truest answer would be that I make films for the love of it. I enjoy every moment of the filmmaking process. I write my own scenario and my own dialogue. And, I find it fascinating to do so.

I select my own actors - sometimes from among the professionals, sometimes right from the street, and when I do that, it seems to me that casting is great fun, because you're actually looking for flesh-and-blood incarnations of the characters you've dreamt up in the process of writing.

Sometimes, you have to work hard with your actors. Sometimes, even an amateur, in his very first appearance before the camera, will do just the thing you want him to do in the very first take.

Shooting, of course, is the great occasion for the marshalling of forces. You as the director must plan and execute the strategy, whereby man and machine will work in harmony to complement each other. This is hard work and needs any amount of patience. But the exhilaration of a shot well taken makes it all seem worthwhile.

Editing is exciting too, but the excitement is on an intellectual level, and it is controlled and subdued by the need for precision and tenderness in the handling of what -- by the mere process of joining -- begins to show signs of an independent life.

Apart from the actual creative work, filmmaking is exciting because it brings me closer to my country and my people. Each film contributes to a process of self-education, making me conscious of the enormous diversity of life around me. I find myself trying, through my films, to trace the underlying pattern that binds this life together. It is the true stuff of the cinema -- this dizzying contrast of sight and sound and milieu. And, it's a challenge for any filmmaker to try and shape its various conflicting elements into a work of art.

Before I made my first film, Pather Panchali, I had only a superficial knowledge of what life in a Bengali village was like. Now I know a good deal about it. I know its soil, its seasons, its trees and forests and flowers, I know how the man in field works and how the women at the well gossip, and I know the children out in the sun and the rain, behaving as all children in all parts of the world do.

My own city of Calcutta, too, I know much better now that I've made a film about it. It isn't quite like any other city in the world to look at. Yet, people are born here and live and make love and earn bread as they do in London and New York and Tokyo.

And, this is what amazes you most and makes you feel indebted to the cinema: this discovery that although you have roots here --in Bengal, in India -- you are at the same time part of a large plan, a universal pattern. This uniqueness and this universality, and the co-existence of the two, is what I mainly try to convey through my films.