A sliver of blood trickles down the helmet of a Sri Lankan soldier; a man jumps out of a wheelchair and enfolds a passing minister's car in a suicide bomber's deadly embrace; three children, their faces blackened for warfare, suddenly arise from within dense foliage, their guns trained for assault. These are images of war that a media-overloaded society has ceased to squirm about. But when seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old, they acquire a different perspective.

MASTER OF SURPRISE: Ratnam's Kannathil Mutthamittal (left) is a strong plea for peace in fractured Sri Lanka

For Mani Ratnam-or Gopalaratnam Subramaniam, to give him his real name-perspective has always been a tricky issue. In Bombay, it landed him in trouble with the Shiv Sena; in Iruvar, he enraged both the DMK and the AIADMK and in Dil Se, the story confused him so much that he didn't give his suicide bomber geographical roots. But it has never deterred him from ploughing ahead with political cinema, the latest example of which is Kannathil Mutthamittal (A Peck on the Cheek), a strong plea for peace in Sri Lanka, during the making of which he suffered his second heart attack. Hospitalised for a month, he returned to shoot the climax scene, one of the finest sequences of urban warfare in Indian cinema, set to an elegiac, almost Celtic chant, composed by the redoubtable A.R. Rahman. And his perspective this time is just right: that of an abandoned child of an LTTE militant played by Nandita Das.

For 20 years, ever since he made Pallavi Anupallavi, Ratnam has gone where angels fear to shoot. Though an MBA from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, from where his classmate Sundeep Singh Bedi became Bobby Bedi of Bandit Queen fame, Ratnam was clearly intended for cinema-his father Venus Ratnam was a well-known producer. For Ratnam, the two decades have seen remarkable changes, especially technical. "When I made my first film," he says, fiddling with his wireless communicator, "the sound was mixed straight onto film. An old man at the mixing table would say 'It's okay, it's okay' whenever you asked. Nobody ever wanted to flip the film." Which is why you can understand that he would love to shoot a film in synch-sound: "Dubbing is killing. It is like doing a film three times: first you write it, then you shoot it, then you dub it." But then, of course, Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai won't get to work with him.

Master of the monosyllabic reply, a typical conversation with the 47-year-old can go like this:

Q: Do you see Kannathil Mutthamittal as part of your work on Roja and Dil Se?
A: No.

Q: Can you ever make the film you and Farrukh Dhondy have co-written on Indira Gandhi's assassination?
A: Well ...

Q: You won't say what you're doing next. Is it really a thriller?
A: No and yes. Or is it yes and no?

"You cannot sit and pre-plan everything unless it is a war scene." -Mani Ratnam

He isn't like that on the sets. Kannathil cinematographer Ravi K. Chandran says he talks a lot-Das will attest to the fact that he often uses swear words-and encourages everyone to experiment. "He's like a tiger, he pushes everybody to excel," says Chandran. The result: a four-minute interior scene establishing the young family of Kannathil was shot in a single take. It can be the other way round too: Khan recalls shooting the Chaiya chaiya song for Dil Se over four days, with the end result having as many as 90 cuts. Das, who doesn't seem to mind that a lot of her scenes ended up on the cutting floor, says he gives actors a lot of room. "A director has to be very secure to allow actors to try different things," she says.

Shaad Ali, his assistant director on Dil Se, calls him the king of organised chaos. Mention this to Ratnam, and he smiles. "It's important to have a scene written but you can't pre-plan everything unless it is a war scene," he says. "I don't do a thing. There are actors, cameramen, technicians." Indeed. All he has done is pioneered the music video-in-song format (in Agni Nakshatram), given the anatomy of secessionism mainstream acceptability (in Roja, Bombay and Dil Se) and captured the angst of the Dravidian politician in the under-acclaimed Iruvar.

More than that, he has always done the unexpected. After the lyrical love story of Alai Payuthey, he could have done more of the same but he decided to go back-metaphorically-to the war zone, this time in Sri Lanka. He clearly did a lot of work on it: "So much has been written on Sri Lanka in the past 20 years-reportage, fiction, poetry and propaganda. Some of it makes a Greek tragedy look mild." His script, he says, tried to capture just a "small portion of it," with all the incidents that take place in the film being taken from real life or literature.

So why, despite Dil Se being the first Indian film to break into the Top 10 in the UK and Kannathil being highly appreciated at international film festivals, has Ratnam not made India's first crossover film? Is it, as Bedi likes to say, that Ratnam is far too successful at home? "Bobby has a theory for everything," smiles Ratnam, "I just want to make a film."

When it turns out to be a movie like Kannathil, it's worth it. Released to tepid commercial response in the south last year, it is expected to do much better in the north where it has been released with some excellent subtitling by the National Film Development Corporation. Beginning in the lush, green forests of Allepey in Kerala, which stand in for Jaffna, and ending in a park recreated in Chennai, which also stands in for Jaffna, the cinematic language of the film changes: from the National Geographic look, Chandran's camera becomes kinetic as it follows the remarkable child actor P.S. Keerthana, then become de-saturated, almost colourless, when the child begins her search for her mother, till the climax where the hand-held camera jerks, shivers and shakes, as if caught in the crossfire itself.

Ratnam's already got an informal school of filmmakers going: he wrote the story and screenplay for Dumm Dumm Dumm for Azhagam Perumal, his one-time assistant, and produced a Tamil film, Five Star, for another assistant, Susi Ganesan. He also supervised the script for Saathiya, Ali's remake of Alai Payuthe. Despite a wildly successful career, he's at heart a middle-class man, living simply in Chennai with his actor-director wife Suhasini and his 10-year-old son, Nandan.

So what's next for the instinctive filmmaker?

Expect the unexpected.