Sharmila, Wes, and Shivendra on a Cinematic Masterpiece | The Hollywood Reporter x Cannes

Anupama Chopra of The Hollywood Reporter India brings together cinema legends Sharmila Tagore, Wes Anderson, and Shivendra Dungarpur at Cannes 2025, creating an intimate conversation around the restoration of Satyajit Ray's 1970 masterpiece "Days and Nights in the Forest." The discussion moves effortlessly between artistic influence and personal memory, with Shivendra detailing his passionate quest to locate the original camera negative during the pandemic, committed to preserving Ray's authentic vision. Sharmila shares captivating behind-the-scenes stories from the challenging forest shoot, where unbearable heat limited filming to early mornings and evenings, yet fostered deep bonds among cast members. She lovingly describes Ray's directing approach – his gentle whispers of instruction creating performances that were instinctive rather than rehearsed – and reveals how he directed different actors with varying degrees of freedom based on their characters.

Wes reflects on discovering "Teen Kanya" as an 18-year-old in Texas, finding in Ray a filmmaker whose independent spirit and literary sensibility profoundly shaped his own artistic journey, even inspiring his recreation of the film's memorable "memory game" scene in "The Darjeeling Limited." Throughout their exchange, Chopra draws out fascinating insights about Ray's extraordinary versatility – composing music, designing graphics, creating storyboards, and handling costumes – while working with extremely limited resources. A particularly touching moment comes when Sharmila reveals that Ray considered this film among his favorites, alongside his Apu Trilogy. Though time runs short, with only enough moments to explore one film from Ray's remarkable oeuvre, this conversation between cinema luminaries perfectly captures the importance of film preservation, with Shivendra emphasising his guiding principle: to constantly ask "what Ray would have thought" while working with original materials to resurrect this masterpiece exactly as its creator intended.