Mumbai, May 31 (IANS) Tamil cinema legend Kamal Haasan, who is awaiting the release of his upcoming film ‘Thug Life’, may have seen it all and done it all but the actor still likes to be a student of cinema.

Kamal belongs to a rare breed of actors, who have the privilege of growing up on celluloid. He made his debut at the age of 6 as a child artist, and has grown up in front of the audience.

Kamal spoke with IANS recently, and shared that given the rapid growth and expansion of cinema, the safest place is to be an actor.

Kamal told IANS, “Cinema is improving so fast and so many tools are coming in, the only safest place is to be a student and not start teaching. What we believe, our ideas might be trampled upon but still we have to believe in those ideas because we are keepers of this time and these ideas. We reflect it”.

He further mentioned, “So, no shame in it. Mr. K. A. Asif is equal to Mr. Satyajit Ray to me. Two different filmmakers”, he added.

Meanwhile, Kamal is reuniting with Mani Ratnam after almost 4 decades with ‘Thug Life’. The two last worked together in ‘Nayakan’ in 1987. A lot has changed in the past 38 years, India opened its economy, witnessed landslide political changes, television peaked, and cinema diversified. Earlier, the veteran actor said that in all of this, cinema has become a language, and a mode of communication for them.

Kamal earlier told IANS, “Cinema has become a language. We don't know how fluent we are in that, but we speak it. And we are improving. Like, we've lost the slur that we had. We lost that baby talk that we had. All that is gone now. But we are still, I think, work in progress (sic)”.

Produced by Kamal Haasan’s Raaj Kamal Films International, Mani Ratnam’s Madras Talkies, R. Mahendran, and Siva Ananth, ‘Thug Life’ is all set for a worldwide theatrical release on June 5, 2025.

--IANS

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