Irrfan Khan: I tried being a star but it did not work for me

Vi segnalo una lunga intervista concessa da Irrfan Khan a The Indian Express, pubblicata il 16 giugno 2013. I tried being a star but it did not work for me:

Vidya Prabhu: If there is one film you wish you had not done?

Chocolate. I couldn't watch it. I was only given the first half of the script. The second part I did not get even after the movie was over. (...)

Dipanita Nath: Why is it that unlike in the West actors in Bollywood are seen so rarely in the theatre? Do you miss the stage?

We don't have a culture of theatre. In America, theatre is alive. People are writing plays. Here when we do theatre, we either borrow scripts from abroad or there are few writers who are writing for a particular audience. So theatre movement itself is not so vibrant here. There are a few genuine people like Naseeruddin Shah who are doing theatre and doing it for the right reason. Sometimes, I do miss it but not in a way that I will leave cinema and start doing theatre. (...)

Suanshu Khurana: What were your growing-up years in Rajasthan like?

My father was from a feudal family and my mother was also from a reputed family. But our fortunes were on a downslide. So those were the days when they were trying to make their own identity but also holding on to their values. They looked down upon films, ditto for sports. They only wanted us to focus on studies. I would go to school at 6 am and come home at 6 pm. I would long for the time when this school business would end and I'd grow up and lead my own life. My father was a hunter, so I can never forget those nights when I accompanied him. They have left a strong impression on my mind. Whenever I get time, I look for jungles where I can go see animals at night. It's the most exciting moment for me.

Shiny Varghese: When you are shooting a film over a long period of time, how do you bring rigour into your work?

That's the nature of the profession. When you work with a story and shoot it for 5-6 months, sometimes you do half a scene today and half the scene four months later. In such cases, you learn as an actor, you pick up the skills. You are driven by both passion and skill and when the passion is gone, the skill takes over. But yes, when only the skills are working, then you are dead, the profession is dead to you and there's no fun.

Smita Nair: Are you stubborn as an actor?

Earlier, I used to be. But now I consider it a collaboration. It's more of a discussion and exploration together. It can't be either my way or his way, because then there is no fun making a movie. We both are there to tell a story, and bring our own elements to it. Like in Life of Pi, (director) Ang Lee had a particular design: he told me that for a particular dialogue, I need to turn and say it in a certain way. Very precise. Five years ago, it would have been very difficult for me. But now, I know how to adapt to that design and make it my own. That's also the function of an actor, to make a certain thing your own. (...)

P. Vaidyanathan Iyer: What do you do when you're not working?

When I do have time, I try to go away from the city, to a place where there are no people and just me. I also try to spend time with my kids. I watch documentaries. It takes time for me to get engaged by fiction.

Sagnik Chowdhury: You are an actor who gives a lot of importance to the craft of acting and filmmaking. Do you foresee a time when you would get into filmmaking yourself?

I dabbled in direction once when I was in television, but I did it because at that point, I was bored of acting. But direction doesn't come naturally to me. I'll definitely direct if a story becomes so compelling that I cannot live without sharing it. I wish I could do it. I wish I could write so that I could make films, because this is the best time to tell stories. The audience is ready to listen to stories, so it is the best time for a director. But I'd love to direct and act. Because as an actor, you have to wait for stories and present the other person's point of view'.

Rangeela: A celebration of life

Vi segnalo l'articolo A celebration of life, di Subhash K. Jha, pubblicato oggi da The Indian Express. Il pezzo è dedicato a Rangeela, uno dei film hindi più famosi, diretto da Ram Gopal Varma e interpretato da Urmila Matondkar, Aamir Khan e Jackie Shroff. Di seguito un estratto: 

'Ram Gopal Varma is a director who is known for films that border on violence and drama. But he revealed a completely different facet with Rangeela, which belonged to a different genre. (...) Playing the middleclass Mumbai girl Mili (the protagonist's name was a furtive tribute by director Ram Gopal Varma to Hrishikesh Mukherjee), Urmila Matondkar rocked the box office and changed the definition of how the conventional heroine conducted herself on screen. (...) She scorched the screen, gyrating sensuously to A.R. Rahman's seductive sounds, (...) in her sizzling Manish Malhotra outfit. The magic of the movies is that it foretells a success story even before the story unfolds. Urmila, who did half a dozen inconsequential films before Rangeela, never anticipated the tremendous response that her character whipped at the boxoffice.

A fairy tale

The plot was a cleverly cloaked fairytale. The girl dreams of stardom, is secretly loved by the street hoodlum Munna (Aamir Khan) but is swept off her feet by the nation's hearththrob Raj Kamal (Jackie Shroff). The film was fresh, sassy, unselfconsciously and unabashedly dream-like in choreography, mood and tempo. Mili's life at home is portrayed with a lightness of touch that Ram Gopal Varma (RGV) never seemed to achieve in his subsequent films, which progressively leant towards dark, blood-soaked themes. In Rangeela, the delight RGV derived in portraying the joy of first love, of success or the first dance of effervescence is vividly portrayed in Urmila's performance. (...) Rangeela is RGV's lightest film to date. Its unmistakable power can be traced to Urmila's restive performance. She epitomises the yearnings of the young Mumbai girl with a strong family support-system to realise her dreams. To Mili, family also means Munna (Aamir Khan). (...) One of the finest performances of Aamir's career, Munna gave Aamir a chance to let go, simply have fun with a part without delving deeply into the character. The scenes where he coaches Urmila to memorise her dialogues for her shooting the next day, depicts the unrequited love, as he gets 'in character'. (...) The lovelorn looks he darts at Mili when she isn't looking (she has her eyes trained to a distant dream) kept Munna's character on the level of a street-smart lover-boy without reducing him to a love lost caricature. (...)

A novel experience

Interestingly, films set in the film world fared dismally at the box office. (...) Rangeela was another experience altogether. The excesses of the entertainment industry were harnessed into telling a tale where it was okay for the wannabe screen queen to replace the tantrum-throwing leading lady. Rangeela is all about wish fulfilment. Urmila gets stardom. Aamir gets Urmila. The superstar Jackie Shroff is left to walk the lonely path. You can't have a love story without a broken heart. While the songs and dances were uniquely evocative and erotic, scenes from the film industry were a tongue-in-cheek narration of reality. (...) RGV wove the wackiness of Bollywood into a fresh tale of rags-to-riches saga. The working-class wannabe star was draped in dresses that defied gravity. RGV never resorted to low-angle vulgarity. His camera had not begun to peer between thighs and down cleavages as yet. Rangeela is a celebration of unalloyed innocence. The fun quotient flowed freely and seamlessly from the actors' own enjoyment of the material that was served up to accentuate the contrast between dreamlike aspiration and harsh reality. Significantly, Munna sold tickets at blackmarket rates outside the theatres where Mili aspired to be on screen. It was the perfect blend of fantasy and reality - stuff that Bollywood fariytales are made of.

Rangeela Trivia

* Urmila's character was partly based on RGV's dream woman Sridevi. (...)

* Actor Rajesh Joshi who played Aamir Khan's friend Pakiya died soon after in a road accident. He was actor Manoj Joshi's sibling.

* The unforgettable performance by the waiter, when Aamir takes Urmila to a 5-star hotel for lunch, apparently provoked RGV to say the waiter performed better than Aamir in the scene. The actor who unknowingly caused a rift between Ramu and Aamir was the Gujarati stage television and film actor Rajeev Mehta.

* Aamir and RGV fell out after Rangeela, both vowing they'd never work with the other.

* Madhur Bhandarkar who worked as an assistant to RGV made a cameo appearance during a scene showing a film shoot'.

Gangs of Wasseypur I: colonna sonora e recensioni

Gangs of Wasseypur I è stato distribuito ieri nelle sale indiane, e l'afflusso da parte del pubblico sembra in costante crescita. Le recensioni sono in generale positive. Ve ne segnalo alcune:

- Mayank Shekhar, 22 giugno 2012: 'So you know Sardar’s the hero, Ramadheer the villain, and the film, a revenge drama seeking poetic justice. And yet the worst mistake you’re likely to make is to walk into this film thinking like that. It’ll kill your fun. In fact, it’s advisable not to even perceive this as a feature film. It’s more of a multi-part mini-series. (...) Your patience is likely to wane after a point. And yes, it does. Yet, just as it does, the makers manage to successfully slip in an inspiring scene, an entertaining snippet or a limited twist in the plot and you go back to engaging with the picture all over again. (...) The film gets the atmospherics, beats and nuances just right. This is quite rare for movies placed in provincial towns. (...) GOW is fictionalised, blood-soaked, demented history that alternates between sharp grittiness and delicious grotesquery. Movies have a gender. This is animalist, male. Given how easy it is to kill off people in this picture, it’s a miracle that they’re all not dead yet!'.

- Raja Sen, Rediff, 22 giugno 2012, ** 1/2: 'And the yawns are the primary issue with Anurag Kashyap's GOW, an impressively ambitious - and excellently shot - collection of memorable characters and entertaining scenes, set to a killer soundtrack. The film never recovers from the unforgivably tedious first half-hour, and despite many laudable moments and nifty touches, never quite engages. This is (...) mostly because Kashyap is defiant in his self-indulgence, piling on more and more when less could have done the job more efficiently. (...) His film tries too hard to be more: more than just an actioner, more than just a drama, more even than a bloodied saga. This overreaching desire to be an Epic makes it a film that, despite some genuinely stunning individual pieces, fails to come together as a whole. There is much to treasure, but there is more to decry. Entire sequences that could be compressed into clever throwaway lines are staged in grand, time-consuming detail; while genuinely sharp lines are often repeated, as if too good to use just once. The characters are a wild, fantastical bunch of oddballs and trigger-happy loons, but attempting to do each fascinating freak justice with meaty chunks of screen-time may not even be film's job. Wasseypur may have worked better as a long and intriguing television series, one deserving a spin-off movie only after six seasons. Here it feels too linear, and even too predictable: scenes themselves often surprise, even delight, but the narrative is cumbersome and unexciting. (...) Yet it is the excess that suffocates all the magic, originality dying out for lack of room to breathe. Kashyap gets flavour, setting and character right, but the lack of economy cripples the film'.

- Shubhra Gupta, The Indian Express, 22 giugno 2012, ****: 'GOW is a sprawling, exuberant, ferociously ambitious piece of film making, which hits most of its marks. It reunites Anurag Kashyap with exactly the kind of style he is most comfortable with: hyper masculine, hyper real, going for the jugular. (...) Wasseypur is not just a place, but a state of mind. (...) There's history here, of the kind almost never attempted by Hindi cinema, bouyed beautifully by geography: the locations are part of the pleasures of the film'.

- NDTV, ***1/2: 'The smartly filmed vendetta saga tosses and turns convulsively from one shootout to another as a bunch of amoral human bloodhounds sniff around for their next kill in a volatile, lawless landscape. The unbridled violence and fetid language - the expletives fly as thick and fast as the bullets - are, however, only one facet of this cinematically layered shot at a time-honoured and popular genre. (...) GOW benefits immensely from a towering performance by Manoj Bajpayee, who immerses himself in the central character of Sardar Khan with such conviction and controlled flair that it becomes impossible to separate the actor from the part'.

Per quanto concerne la spumeggiante colonna sonora, vi segnalo:

- Gangs of Wasseypur - Lyrics translations, MoiFightClub, 7 giugno 2012

- Songs in ‘Bhojpurised’ Hindi, Kashika Saxena, The Times of India, 15 giugno 2012:

'Never underestimate the power of music, because we love to have a song for every occasion. Filmmakers seem to understand this sentiment all too well, which is why even though Anurag Kashyap’s “Gangs Of Wasseypur” is a film about gangsters, its music is being talked about as much as its storyline. The filmmaker explained the quantum of music in the movie in a panel discussion at the Cannes Film Festival saying, “You can’t really get away from music in India. You walk on the street and you’ll hear music from some corner, somewhere. Music is omnipresent in our lives. And the second thing is that music has become a very important part of marketing. If you have good music in your film, you get free airplay, you get awareness about your film, because each Friday you have ten films competing for audience attention and you need to build that awareness. In fact, today, when sometimes a film in India doesn’t have music, marketing teams look for ways to introduce music, such as in the rolling credits, and release that music. I have learnt to try to use music in a way that does not impact the flow of the film, that it becomes as an extension of what is going on in front of the audience - then it’s not a forced insert just for the sake of marketing.”

The attention this film’s music is getting comes as no surprise, what with lyrics like “I am hunter and she want to see my gun”. Twenty-seven-year-old music director Sneha Khanwalkar has used a mix of eclectic artistes from places like Patna, Gaya, Muzaffarpur, Garbandha, among others, for the songs of the film, and she says that the idea was to use simple, vernacular lyrics that can be sung and understood easily. The feedback that she got from Cannes, where the film was praised by many international critics, was that the music wasn’t “very Bollywood”. “It was sounding very global to them because they probably haven’t heard these voices before. These voices are so authentic and from such interior parts. For instance, I went to Trinidad to record this guy Vedesh Sookoo for the song “Hunter” and he only speaks English, but he’s a Bihari who has never been to India, which I find very interesting. I then merged his part with other singers from more of core Bihar and made this song. ‘Shut up’ and ‘my name is’ are words and phrases that are used very easily in small towns like these and I’ve used the accent to show the vernacular influence,” she tells us. No other song except “Hunter” has Hinglish in it, but the lyrics are, in what Sneha calls “Bhojpurised Hindi”. “It is basically core interior land music. The vocal nature is quite cool, and I don’t think one would care about what is actually being sung. They could understand it, but even if they don’t, it’s all right because they would still get the meaning. Even I didn’t try to learn the exact language,” she says.

The people she met while she was making the music for the film, the ones who ended up singing these songs, aren’t professional singers. They’re people who would “probably start singing in the middle of the night in their village, if at all,” she says, adding, “They aren’t professional, but authentic. Like one of the women who sang “Womaniya”, Rekha Jha, is a housewife. Her father taught music and that’s how she did chorus for me. But later I found out that she’s from this place called Mithila, near Ganga, and that’s why her voice is so different from other voices in the Bhojpuri belt.” “The good part is that there was no hurry when I was making the music of this film. There was enough time to do this process because there was no rush; we were thinking only of the music. I gathered all this and then decided who to put where, and then the music got intertwined with the film,” she says'.

Vedi anche Le prime del 22 giugno 2012: Gangs of Wasseypur I

Marc Webb: Irrfan Khan has a very commanding presence

Irrfan Khan in The Amazing Spider-Man

The Amazing Spider-Man verrà distribuito nelle sale indiane il 29 giugno 2012, una settimana prima rispetto agli Stati Uniti. Vi segnalo l'articolo Irrfan has a very commanding presence: ‘Spider-Man’ director, pubblicato oggi da The Indian Express, che raccoglie alcune dichiarazioni di Marc Webb: 'I have been an enormous fan of Irrfan for a very long time. I first saw him in The namesake, The warrior and in TV series In treatment. For Dr. Ratha, I needed someone who projected sophistication, had lot of strength and a very commanding presence and Irrfan fit that bill. He is in the first half of the film and in several scenes. (...) I would not call his character a good guy or the bad guy, I would say he has a job to do and he has started about doing it. (...) Dr. Ratha works in Oscorp, the company owned by previous villain Norman Osborn. Irrfan plays the boss of Dr. Curt Conner. He plays an important role in Conner's transformation as villain 'The Lizard'. Irrfan provides the pressure'.

Il 12 marzo 2012 Renuka Vyavahare aveva riportato altre dichiarazioni sull'argomento rilasciate da Webb, pubblicate da The Times of India. Irrfan Khan has wonderful abilities: Mark Webb: 'Irrfan's importance in Hollywood is an interesting thing. A lot of directors are really starting to take notice of him and are looking for roles for Irrfan because he's got such a wonderful reputation. There’s a show he did here [in the US] called “In Treatment” and you really got to see his wonderful abilities. Whether its Danny Boyle or Ang Lee, really very strong directors are starting to take notice of this star who comes from a land that some view as exotic and far away from us. But you realize with actors like Irrfan, how close they really are. (...) Irrfan, it’s good to see you again. I hope you’re doing well and my best to you and your family”.'

Pakeezah one of a kind

Vi segnalo l'articolo Pakeezah one of a kind, di Rajiv Vijayakar, pubblicato oggi da The Indian Express. Pakeezah è un classico senza tempo della cinematografia hindi.