A.R. Rahman Reveals Next Film Directing Effort After Cannes XR Title ‘Le Musk’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Naman Ramachandran
·3 min read
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Oscar, BAFTA and Grammy winning Indian composer A.R. Rahman (“Slumdog Millionaire”) has revealed his next directorial venture after “Le Musk,” his debut which premiered at the Cannes Film Market’s Cannes XR program.

The project will be another film in the VR space, titled “Confessions.” “Now this [“Le Musk”] is finished and we’re happy about it, we just want to do something which is much more simpler, but more deeper in emotion,” Rahman told Variety. A script is 60% ready, Rahman said.

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Unlike “Le Musk,” a passion project that commenced in 2016, “Confessions” will not take that long to come to fruition because the technology has evolved since then.

“I see technology as a tool to bring out a very different kind of emotion to transport people,” Rahman said, adding that his “Le Musk” team had worked tirelessly solely on the project for six years.

“Le Musk,” which evolved from an idea from Rahman’s wife Saira, is a transporting experience involving haptics, aroma and motion, experienced at an immersive VR chair by Los Angeles-based company Positron.

It follows heiress and musician Juliet Merdinian, who, 20 years since she was orphaned, seeks out the men who changed her destiny with one powerful memory — that of their scent. Saira has an “incredible sense of smell,” says Rahman, with a dressing table packed with 150 perfumes, and can identify scents at 10 paces. Her olfactory sense is so keen that she advises Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan on his choice of perfume, Rahman says.

The process was a journey of discovery for Rahman and his team who were on a quest to keep the experience as subtle and comfortable as possible without the usual VR complaints of nausea and fatigue. To this end, the film was cut down from its original 75 minutes to 36 and the edits were honed to keep the transitions as subtle as possible.

“I think there’s a lot of things to discover – how much the human mind can take, how much can your eyes take, how much can the ears take,” says Rahman.

Nora Arnezeder, who plays Merdinian, says that the “Le Musk” experience was more of a “feeling” and “sensation” than acting. When she watched the film, “I honestly felt like I was flying,” says Arnezeder, who is currently in Paramount+ series “The Offer” and has Gonzalo López-Gallego’s “American Star” alongside Fanny Ardant and Ian McShane coming up.

“I guess acting is acting to an extent anywhere you do it, but it is very, very different in terms of medium,” says Guy Burnet who plays the key role of a music conductor in “Le Musk” of his experience on the film. “I do see VR as the next medium, because it is different. And you got to approach it differently.”

Next up for Burnet is Walter Hill’s Western “Dead for A Dollar” alongside Rachel Brosnahan, Willem Dafoe and Christoph Waltz and Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb origin film “Oppenheimer,” where he plays a physicist.

“Le Musk” is headed next to renowned museums and theme parks, with several partners ready to collaborate, Rahman says. Ravindra Velhal, global content technologist, Intel Corporation and executive producer and VR technology director of “Le Musk” is planning to leverage the Cannes platform for wider exposure. Velhal has previously worked on the VR experiences of “Dunkirk” and “Spider-Man: Homecoming.”

“The goal here is to give you a glimpse into the future and the the potential of immersive storytelling – to push the boundaries and then take it to a larger and wider distribution as a whole,” says Velhal. “This can be distributed on traditional platforms like Oculus and so on. But that will not give you this feeling of motion and olfactory. So what we are trying to give you here is an ultra premium experience of immersive storytelling.”

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