As Yvonne mentioned, we recently shot some additional scenes (four months after wrapping). One of the scenes required Eli and Dave to have a conversation in a small office bathroom. We did several takes, and eventually I settled on a shot which covered both actors satisfactorily--it was inventive without being ostentatious. A week after shooting the scene, I watched Ray's Abhijaan, which contains the identical shot--one actor in a close-up in the foreground, framed right and looking right (very unconventional) and the other actor framed left, a fraction of the size of the actor in the foreground. What makes Ray's shot more interesting than mine is that this is how he introduces us to the protagonist of his film--diminuted in a cracked and chipped mirror, with no cross-cutting or inserts, a shot sustained for nearly three minutes. And we obediently search the face of that man in the mirror (Soumitra Chatterjee, a stock protagonist) because Ray so masterfully intrigues us, drawing us in without effort. Ray perfectly illustrates that a camera technique can be both massive and stealthy, that poetic grandeur need not--in fact, should not--announce itself.

Being pickled in Ray, and having attributed certain aspects of Around the Bay to his influence, I should take this opportunity to express some things I tried to do in my first feature, and to a lesser extent in Canary, which can be traced to him. I'll let Pauline Kael do the talking because this part of my directorial process is not so easy for me to verbalize.

"Those who find Bergman profound and sophisticated are very likely to find Ray rather too simple...The concept of humanity is so strong in Ray's films that a man who functioned as a villain could only be a limitation of vision, a defect, an intrusion of melodrama into a work of art which seeks to illuminate experience and help us feel. There is, for example, a defect of this kind in De Sica's Umberto D: the landlady is unsympathetically caricatured so that we do not understand or respond to her as we do to the others in the film. I don't think Ray ever makes a mistake of this kind: his films are so far from the world of melodrama that such a mistake is almost unthinkable. We see his characters not in terms of good or bad, but as we see ourselves, in terms of failures and weaknesses and strength and, above all, as part of a human continuum--fulfilling, altering, and finally accepting ourselves as part of this humanity...This larger view of human experience...is almost miraculously present in every detail of Satyajit Ray's films...It is a comment on the values of our society that those who saw greatness in the Apu Trilogy, particularly in the opening film, with its emphasis on the mother's struggle to feed the family, are not drawn to a film in which Ray shows the landowning class and its collapse of beliefs. It is part of our heritage from the thirties that the poor still seem 'real' and the rich 'trivial'...Eisenstein cartooned the upper classes and made them hateful; they became puppets in the show he was staging. Ray, by giving them the respect and love that he gives the poor and struggling, helps us to understand their demoralization."

I'm pleased that similar observations have been made by reviewers and interviewers in regard to Around the Bay. I believe much of the same vision inhabits Canary, though the newer film is by design more enigmatic and more genre-bound than the previous and will offer a very different experience.

One of Ray's essays about the influence of neorealism on his own work is titled (amusingly, flaccidly) Some Italian Films I Have Seen. Here is a list of Some Ray Films I Have Seen:

An Enemy of the People
The Home and the World
Pikoo's Day
Sadgati
The Chess Players
The Middleman
Company Limited
Days and Nights in the Forest
Nayak
The Coward
The Saint
Charulata
Mahanagar
Abhijaan
Three Daughters
Devi
The World of Apu
Jalsaghar
Aparajito
Pather Panchali