Shailaza's Blog

Tag: rajkumar rao

  • From Bad to Good and Now Spanking!

    From Bad to Good and Now Spanking!

    I will not say that the fear is not real. Of course, it is! Because you are always worried about things like am I saying something wrong or am I crossing boundaries when I am talking to a senior from the industry. And also, you don’t have any backing. So, you don’t know where to fall back. I will come back to the class thing- the middle class. For example, I don’t have any kind of family money to fall back on. This is the only space I can succeed or fail. So, there is no option for failure.

    Abhishek Banerjee is probably one of those rare breed of celebrities who are very prompt with their replies. A conversation with him is about living life king-size. His philosophy says to build a good life first and chase your dreams after that. Acting has been the first and foremost love for this casting director who is now living his dream. Some snippets from a wheeling conversation:

    Did you always want to become an actor?

    Yeah, since childhood. I did my first play, Ramayan in Kalpakkam, near Chennai, which is a nuclear power station. My dad who retired as a deputy commandant in CISF (Central Industrial Security Force) was posted there at the time. I was quite bad in it.

    How do you know you were bad?

      I saw the recording and I knew this was not good. But I worked on improving myself.  Finally I came to  Kirori Mal College in Delhi where I joined the Theatre Group and trained for three years. It was here that I learned all the basics of acting. After that, I went to Mumbai.

     You are an actor as well as a casting director too.  Has the actor in you ever interfered with the casting director or vice versa?

    As a casting director, it interferes when I’m acting, because if I’m not able to do a particular scene, then I’m always going back to the basics of how I would direct an actor in the audition room. So sometimes I tend to direct myself when I’m not getting the notes right. I have always been greedy to act. But when I was casting, I was very professional. And I like that about myself. If you give me any job, I’ll forget about my selfish needs. I will first fulfill the job. Probably this is because of my dad’s defence background which made me a very disciplined kid. And I’ve seen him serve for the country selflessly. So I think that culture any army kid or any paramilitary defence kid will have. We would like to, , do the job first and then think about what we’re getting.

    But the road to acting is full of struggles. Isn’t it?

    I think I have always told myself that I don’t want to live in poverty and dream big. I always wanted to live my life first and then chase my dreams. I wanted everything. I wanted a car. I wanted a good house. I wanted to wear good clothes. I wanted to go for foreign holidays. And I didn’t want to wait till my acting career took off. Yes, in the last six years, I’ve been earning as an actor. But just think, if I hadn’t been able to earn before I got success as an actor, I wouldn’t have been able to travel abroad. I wouldn’t have been able to see Europe. I would have not been able to see the world, interact with people or eat amazing food.

     And I seriously feel as children who belong to middle-class families it’s our responsibility to fulfill our life first. I never wanted to be a burden on my parents. I never wanted to make them break their provident fund or investments. I hear stories like that. I didn’t want to do that. So, I wanted to earn for myself, fend for myself, and then continue chasing my dream. Because I chose that dream, not them.

    What happened with Dharma productions?

    When I first came to Mumbai, my friend Anmol and I got a big opportunity to cast for the movie Agneepath starring Hrithik Roshan. But it didn’t work out for us because we were new and weren’t mature enough to cast a proper commercial film. We were doing Indie films. Okay. So we did not understand that for a film of that size and stature, we needed actors who have presence so that they don’t get overshadowed by huge stars Hrithik Roshan or Sanjay Dutt or Rishi Kapoor. Now I understand that. When I did a film like Veda, I understood that it takes a lot to stand in front of John Abraham. So, yeah that kind of maturity was not there.

    Moreover, at the time I went back to my native place, Kharagpur, because my dad called me for Durga Puja. And those days, my dad was more important than my job. So, we could not work well. And they fired us. But these kind of things happen all the time. Many people get fired from many jobs.

    Didn’t you feel depressed about such a setback in the very beginning of your career?

    Of course! Both of us cried like babies I still remember Anmol and me, we went to meet Rajkumar Gupta, the same very Amar Kaushik, who directed me in Stree and Gautam Kishan Chandani, who was our casting director, our boss. And we were crying. Anmol was crying. He was in tears. I was not in tears, but I was almost teary.  We thought our career was done and now nobody is going to give us jobs, etc.

    But they made us realize that we could not take things so casually and we had to become more open-minded. After that debacle, the first movie that really gave us the confidence that we could make it in this industry was  Akshay Kumar’s Gabbar which was produced by Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

    Today, I am very proud that we both that despite the fact that I had no idea how of how this industry works and making such mistakes, I have been able to manage a place in this industry.  And we learned from our mistakes. And we managed a place in this industry. And this is the thing which I want to share with the youngsters. Because usually what happens is, I have seen a lot of youngsters who get bitter. I worked with Dharma again on movies like Okay Jaanu, Kalank, Student of the Year 2, very recently Kill, Gyaara by Gyaara. I even acted in Dharma’s production, Ajeeb Daastan.

    I will not say that the fear is not real. Of course, it is! Because you are always worried about things like am I saying something wrong or am I crossing boundaries when I am talking to a senior from the industry. And also, you don’t have any backing. So, you don’t know where to fall back. I will come back to the class thing- the middle class. For example, I don’t have any kind of family money to fall back on. This is the only space I can succeed or fail. So, there is no option for failure.

    So, you have to guard yourself constantly?

    Yeah, of course, I have to. And I have to also be very confident that I am here to do this. And I can do it. For me, both my movies, Veda and Stree 2 releasing on the same day is a big message for all the outsiders that there is a lot of hope only if you have the strength to survive. To face rejections and to fight on, to move on.

     How did Stree happen and Jana happen?

    So, during my struggle days, I was not getting any opportunity as an actor. Amar Kaushik, was the associate director to Rajkumar Gupta. And I was the associate casting director to Gautam Kishan Chandani. Okay. And Gautam sir and Raj sir are very good friends. And they used to always work together. And invariably, even I used to work with them. So, now, I used to give cues hope that one day Raj sir would give me a role. But that never happened. And Amar Kaushik somehow saw the potential in me, always. We became friends. After some time we did  Devasheesh Makhija’s film Ajji. Amar saw it and loved my work. And then, a few years down the line, he made this short film called Abba which won the Berlin Best Film in the finale. And I saw that film and I was blown away. I could not believe a guy who dances to Govinda songs, remembers dialogues of Kader Khan, making a film so fine and so refined like Abba. So, I complimented him on the movie but that was that at the time. Later on, I worked with him on No One Killed Jessica and Go Goa Gone, all small roles. And then I got to know that he’s making Stree. I immediately called him up. He asked me to audition for Jana, a cute and innocent character. The problem was I’m just not like Jana in real life. I’m very street-smart and a go-getter, completely antithesis of Jana. So, I told him that, no, I don’t want to do this cowardly character. I want to do Bittu. He’s more like me. And he said, no, no, no, we are considering Aparshakti Khurana for that.  So, I just went ahead and gave the audition for Jana. And the minute I gave it, I knew this is me. Now, as a grown-up Abhishek, I’m unlike Jana. But when I was a boy called Gola (my Bengali nickname) I was exactly like Jana. I was a scared kid, mama’s boy, so yes I could play Jana with ease when I channeled my inner child.

    According to you, do girls have more reason to become stree or the boys Sarkata in today’s world?

    Oh, no, no. The women have more reason to become stree. Because stree is power. And I think that’s what we’ve always talked about in the film. That women can do anything.

    Are you somebody who believes in ghosts?

     I believe in energies.

    So, did you have any experiences while shooting?

    One night, me and Rajkumar were sitting and eating food in Chanderi. Our staff had gone back. It was late at night. Suddenly, we heard a noise. I immediately grabbed a stick that was lying nearby. And Rajkumar was very scared. And we both were discussing what to do. The noise was getting louder. It sounded as if someone was heavily panting. And I was like really getting scared. Because we were alone in that hotel. It was not a 5-star. It was just a guest house. There was no security, nothing. We kept contemplating for a while. We started following the noise. And the panting kept increasing. And it was like really growing louder and louder. And finally, we gathered some courage and we peeped from the wall of the guest house. And we just saw a huge monkey coughing. The monkey was looking at us. We are looking at the monkey. The monkey just showed us some teeth. And he just ran off. He climbed the tree and started coughing there. I have never seen a monkey with a bad cold. Poor guy!

    Now how has your life changed after Stree 2?

     I am back on the sets and suddenly I am getting some lead role offers. Which is great. I have been waiting for that. A lot of people have called. People now know me on the road. It feels great. Famous is one thing. And to be loved for your craft is another thing. So, when you have both that’s an amazing space to be in.

    So which set are you back in? 

    It is a new movie called Hisab directed by Vipul Shah

    –Concluded

    This article by Shailaza Singh was published in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on September 6, 2024

  • Spooked Out and Laughing Too

    Amar Kaushik, the director of movies like Bhediya, Bala, Stree and most recently Stree 2 is what you would call a complete movie buff. He has grown up watching movies, he lives movies, breathes movies, and even makes movies!

    When you first start talking to Amar Kaushik, it is difficult to imagine this soft-spoken man as the director of movies like Stree, Munjya and the current reigning blockbuster Stree 2. You would imagine him to direct a gentle romance rather than a horror comedy. But then appearances can be deceptive. When he gets talking, his tales can completely captivate you and then you realize what makes him such a great story teller.

    Some excerpts:

    What are your earliest memories of your childhood?

    My father was a forest ranger. When he was posted in Arunachal Pradesh, we used to hire VCRs and watch films. We always had electricity outages. So, we used to finish one film in three days depending on the electricity. So, when I would watch the movie, it would stay with me for all the time. I remember watching movies like Khoon Bhari Mang, Maine Pyaar Kiya, and all those Hindi classical, 90s films.

    So, did your time there influence the movies that you have made so far?

    Yes, my movie Bhediya has a lot of influence from that part because I have lived near jungles and watched my father. At that time, he had to battle a lot of smuggling of wood and trees. So, I did use a lot of those memories in Bhediya.

    What about Stree and Munjya? Where did those movies come from?

    These movies have been inspired a lot by Kanpur, where I did my college.  Things like friendship of friends, the small town environment, how friends keep talking for hours about the same thing, how in every group there is a person who gives of gyan, how every little thing is blown into a big thing.

    Let us talk about the Stree movies. In the first one, the Stree abducts the men and in the second one, the women are being abducted. How did you come about the idea for the second one?

    This was the demand of the script. In the first one, Stree has left, so what was next? Niren Bhatt, the writer and I had a lot of discussions. In the first part, we already had established the back story of why Stree was killed and how she comes back to exact vengeance from those who killed her. So we decided to bring back the character who had killed her and whom she had killed in return by chopping off his head. So, we got this character called Sarkata. He was someone who could not handle modern women and believes that women should be subjugated and enslaved.

    So,  he comes back as a ghost and starts abducting those women who were modern in their thinking. But it takes time for the townspeople to realize that someone is abducting the girls. Initially, everyone thinks that since the girls were modern, they were simply running away in pursuit of better opportunities. The irony was that in the first part, when the boys were disappearing, everyone knew that they were being abducted by Stree but in the second part when the girls were disappearing, no one thought that someone was abducting them.  So our film starts from that point where we see that the Sarkata has captured this girl and taken her to his realm by breaking the wall of her house in the process. It is then everyone realizes that the girls are not running away but they are being abducted. And that’s how the story started. We then started developing the characters integrating the old stories and tried to figure out who would rescue these women and who Shraddha Kapur’s character was. Every answer came after that.

    The VFX in Stree 2 are even better than the first part. How did that happen?

    We used to see a lot of foreign movies with such amazing effects and often get frustrated about why can’t we do it in Indian cinema. These effects demand a lot of money and obviously, one doesn’t have that much money because the collections are not that much. So, you need to be smart enough to invest your energy and money in small sequences and show parts of the entity. Sometimes, you show the head, and sometimes you show the hand or the leg in small sequences throughout the movie to create the mystery and so that you can spend more money on making the climax grand. Yes, it has been a gradual learning process and now we have an excellent VFX team. For each scene, we had a lot of discussions. For example, in the scene where Shraddha Kapoor gets into the body of Rajkumar Rao, I used the concept of Ardnarishwar but I wanted to do it differently. In most movies, we see that once the ghost gets into the body, you just see the other person and not the ghost. I wanted to see both of them even though she entered his body. So that was something we experimented in VFX.

    So, how do you create the balance to enhance your horror elements without overshadowing the comedy parts?

    When it comes to horror comedies, we are very clear that if this is horror, then we should treat this as a proper horror sequence. We should not buffoon this. We should go full horror in those things. And people should feel that. And then comedy should come very organically from that scene. It’s a very difficult thing. Actually, while doing such scenes of horror, one has to be serious.  And then you also have to be aware of the kind of mood on the sets. For example, in the case of horror, no one should laugh or smile. Then I put something in between that sequence where humor comes from. For example, lets say everyone is quiet in a scene and then someone will suddenly say ‘Bhago’ and his way of running will be very funny. Or maybe they are running and someone has said something and the other person reacts to it, which can be very funny and then they realize that they are being pursued by the ghost and they start running again.  So, it’s these little things that strike a balance between horror and comedy. So, first you need to get it down on paper and then handle all the sequences on a scene-by-scene basis.

     Laughter is probably one of the most difficult things to do. While shooting do you have a measure of how would the final scene be? Whether the intended humour will make people laugh or not.

    I go by my instinct. I keep looking at my script and monitor. And the scenes are shot quite organically. One character says something and the other one replies. So, you have to take shots with three different cameras. But then the magic also lies in the editing. How you will cut the scene, how you will edit it out, where you have to stop the punch where you have to make the music stick, where you need silence, all those things add to that horror. If you’re just standing and saying the lines, but the reaction isn’t correct, or the music isn’t correct, or the situation isn’t correct, or the camera angle isn’t correct, then it doesn’t work. But when everything comes together, obviously you need the best of the actors to do comedy. The way they react to the dialogue, they have to keep on repeating every time. For example, if there are five takes or ten takes, they have to keep on repeating the same energy, the same joke in the same manner. So you have to have very great actors to do comedy. And then there are some other aspects, like the music, how to sound, how to edit. So when the public sees all of this, they enjoy it. That’s interesting. Because you say a joke, so you have to say it once and laugh. How do you make them laugh again? How do you do this And then you have to ask yourself, yes, this will work, this won’t work. Ultimately depends on the director’s instinct.

    When you do a movie or an artwork, it’s like your own child. Don’t you get biased towards it? Like how do you develop an objective view?

    One understands these things. Sometimes what happens is, the actor is not comfortable while saying that line. It all depends on how that line is coming out of his mouth. So the actor has to be very comfortable while saying that line. You need to understand every joke’s germ. Why is this joke coming out? Sometimes what happens is, you’ve written it well, but when you say it, it doesn’t work. Then you need to, as a director, you change a few things, change a few lines, and then change the mood, change the lines and the way it is to be said.  Like how to say it. This isn’t working, let’s say this. Then you develop by gelling up with the actors, that this isn’t working, let’s do something more. And then they give you a character-related something. 

    You’ve had the same actors for the two movies. Have the actors also helped you by evolving into their characters? For example, there’s Shraddha Kapoor, or there’s Rajkumar Rao. He probably knows more about Vicky because he’s lived it. So, does that help the director?

     Yes, obviously. The actors know these things. With the actors, like Vicky and Jana, they know their characters. So, it is very easy for them to just come and start doing the same thing. Get into the skin of the character. And they’ve lived the characters for the last five years. They know that character very well. But after that, you have to stop them from overdoing anything because there is a chance of that too.

     But you’ve used a lot of legends. People are bringing it up on the internet that there’s a British Army officer in Lansdowne whose head was chopped off and he roams around as a headless ghost. Did you do any research on this?

    No, not at all. In the film when Chanderi Puran is being narrated by Rudra Bhaiya, it was said that Stree came back and chopped off the head of the person who murdered her. So when he comes back, his whole body can’t come with his head. His head will have to be shown as separated from the body.

    Any scary incidents on your film set while filming? Did anything happen?

     Yeah, a little bit. Whenever we go for a shoot, we go to locations where there are spooky locations. Because it makes our work easier. I intentionally ask the team to look for spooky locations. So when the actors reach there, they get to know the stories of the place and obviously, they are scared and when they shoot the scene, they look scared.  So half the work is done!

    You didn’t get scared while making the film?

    Yeah, but that’s what I made the movie. To exorcise my fear!

    Normally, in every movie, there is a point when people see their mobile phones because the sequences get repetitive. How did you ensure that the audience remained interested?

    This is what my agenda has been whenever someone watches my movie, they should always remain on the edge. They should be so involved that they don’t want to miss any dialogues. So, I try to pace the movie in such a way that my audience should always be engrossed in the movie completely because I get irritated when someone is looking at their mobile in the middle of the movie.

    To be continued………..

    This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on September 5, 2024