You can see this characterization in the film. There is no De Niro. There is only LaMotta.
Because you have completely become the character, it feels like you are playing yourself. And, of course, there are many times when you construct that character with the director. Anurag holds workshops, but let me give you a more mainstream example. In Boney Kapoor’s film Mom, I play a detective who goes by the moniker DK. (This role holds echoes of a character I had played a long time ago on stage in a play called Aakhri Kitab.) When they read out the script to me, I proposed we sculpt the character further so that I could portray it as truthfully as possible. So I suggested making DK mostly bald with a few thin strands of long hair towards the back of the scalp. I put in fake teeth that jut out like the cartoon character Bugs Bunny’s. After some more such layers, DK became unrecognizable. Nobody can really tell this is Nawaz. I asked them to take a picture of me on the phone, so that I could look at it to confirm this. Later, I sat for hours staring at the picture of DK in full make-up, trying to imbibe who he was, what he was, how he felt, what he thought, what he would do next . . . everything so that I could bring him alive on the screen.
The nuances in acting are of the thickness of a single strand of hair. Every tiny movement shows on camera and conveys something. You relax your shoulder and it is a different character, you make it tense and it shows something else. Our cinema is rather verbose with written dialogues. But if you completely understand the essence of a scene, then even fumbling with the dialogues is okay because, guess what? In real life, fumbling is normal. So it is more believable. Like in Badlapur there were no dialogues in the script. Dialogues were prepared on the spot. And look at Bypass where there are no dialogues at all! If thoughts are connecting in the script, then the actor can keep talking irrespective of dialogues. Like, for example, if the situation that is explained to the actor is that he wants to pee and the toilet is 10 kilometres away and he is walking there with his friend, he doesn’t need dialogues. He can explain his desperate urgency to his friend, creating comedy that everyone can relate to. Then he could stretch it all the way to the government—how the government needs to create more toilets and why it is not constructing them because it is too busy in all kinds of corrupt activities, and thereby create political satire and whatnot. He can go on for half an hour talking just about this and keep the audience entertained, without being given dialogues, simply by being in the situation. Our folk artists were masters at this. We have butchered this traditional gift. In our industry, most of the time writers simply give out lines.
Another thing I have never quite understood is this quintessential Bollywood concept of the hero. Bhai, we know that a hero is somebody who does something extraordinary in an ordinary situation. That’s it. In our industry, it is completely the opposite. He is already beautiful, wears beautiful clothes, grooms himself beautifully, has a beautiful chick, dances beautifully. He seems to be more of a peacock than a hero!
When I played a gullible guy in a masala movie like Freaky Ali, there was another element altogether. This character is a simpleton who happens to become a celebrated golfer. He starts out selling underwear on the street. He is humble, he has no ego. He does not think much. His thought process is limited. But Nawaz’s mind goes beyond Ali’s, right? This is exactly what I needed to remember. And I did constantly remind myself while playing the character to curb my own mind. I should not be more intelligent than Ali. This is very subtle and, like most subtle things, very powerful. This is also the reason why intelligent actors playing characters who are birdbrains so often fail. Their portrayals don’t seem believable. A good actor must become completely stupid when required.
In real life too, you need to follow the process. So if you know you have a shoot in a fortnight, you have to become the character. There is a process wherein people go into a trance, dressing like the character, bathing or not, becoming unkempt or not, etc., basically whatever the character demands, and go into a sort of trance. People in our industry call this ‘method acting’. But this is completely wrong. This is not what method acting is. It can actually drive you psychotic, to the brink of collapse.
Like, for example, there was a film by Ram Gopal Varma, and a very good actor was playing a bandit in it, sort of like the notorious dacoit Veerappan. I happened to have a small role in the film as well and so went to Ramu’s office and saw him there. The protagonist had long, dishevelled hair and was dressed like Veerappan—he had a menacing vibe about him. He was prancing around in a very intimidating manner, and every now and then breaking the daunting silence he himself had created, by shouting, ‘Oye, behenchod!’ This was accompanied by vigorous gestures of anger.
Since I had just walked in, I had no idea what he was up to. I could not see who were these invisible people he was hollering at. Everyone took great care to maintain pin-drop silence around him and not disturb him no matter what.
‘What is he doing?’ I asked his assistant inquisitively.
‘Sshhh!’ he warned me. ‘He is in character. Don’t disturb, please.’
This actor would stay in this state for hours while everybody around him too stayed in their consequent state of an intimidated silence. He would brood and scream an abuse every now and then. Ultimately, we went on shoot in the forest. His first scene is where he is standing threateningly with his big gun. He is facing some fourteen–fifteen people who are his minions. A policeman comes to him. And he says to him, ‘We will see, madarchod!
Every time Ramu said ‘Action!’, he would instantly say ‘motherfucker’ or ‘sisterfucker’ before screaming out his original dialogue. Then suddenly, just like that, he collapsed. All of us were worried and ran and huddled around him, asking what happened, what happened. Even while he was unconscious, he kept scolding us in a faint voice: ‘Motherfuckers, sisterfuckers.’ We chuckled and said, ‘Banda character mein hai.’ (The dude is in character.) It was as if he was possessed by a spirit. It was so stressful for him that he finally caved in under the enormous stress he had put upon himself.
He is a very good actor but was this kind of thing which many call ‘method acting’ really necessary? I mean, look at the ultimate jungle bandit Veerappan. There is no way anybody can run in front of him. He can smell you miles away. He is a master of subtleties, so much so that he can even sense a snake’s movements. After all, he is a creature of the jungle. Many actors take the same approach as this actor, calling it ‘method acting’. But it is different from the process that, say, De Niro followed in Raging Bull. To me, that is method acting.
Whether you are on stage or on camera, you cannot go into a trance, stare at emptiness and deliver your lines. It does not matter if you are spouting ‘behenchod’ and ‘madarchod’ or ‘to be or not to be’ (Hamlet’s legendary speech). This is a very effective way of alienating the audience. You must look into the eyes of your fellow characters or your counterparts on stage and then talk. In folk theatre, you talk to the audience. Look at Mel Gibson’s Hamlet speech or Laurence Olivier in Othello. They deliver soliloquies but break away from these theatrics, and connect with their fellow characters, with the props, the space around. That is why they were able to get across the rawness of their character’s mad struggles.
Every now and then, somebody will praise an actor’s performance and say, ‘Wow, he is such an amazing actor, he had real tears, he really felt the character.’ But does the audience care if they are real tears or glycerine? This is where the actor’s sacrifice comes in. The tears should not be in the actor’s eyes. They should be in the audience’s eyes. If he is crying, then how will the audience cry? His job is not to cry but to take the audience to that place through his performance that the audience cries. The emotion is the audience’s work. Way back in 500 BCE, Bharata Muni wrote in the Natya Shastra that an actor’s job is not to flow with emotion. His job is only to create it. The audience’s job is to taste it, savour it, as if tasting a dish. Who can be a bigger psychologist than an actor then?
I am a
big fan of Konstantin Stanislavski’s Magic If approach. So much so that I have named my production house after it. He advocates getting into the subconscious of the character which then justifies his conscious moves. Everything that I am always harping upon, like knowing what the character is thinking in his free time or getting into the politics of the character rather than his emotions, I derive from his school of thought. Once you have used various sensory stimuli to immerse yourself in the character’s world and then used them as tools to know the subconscious of the character, then you become it. Like, for Manto, way before the shoot, I prepared the physical world around me to resemble his—cut off communication, dressed like him, refurnished my room like his was in his era, replaced my bed, etc.-—as a vehicle to enter his mind, his subconscious, so that I was able to think exactly like he did. This is what Stanislavski says: ‘When I give a genuine answer to the “if”, then I do something, I am living my own personal life. At moments like that there is no character. Only me. All that remains of the character and the play are the situation, the life circumstances, all the rest is mine, my own concerns, as a role in all its creative moments depends on a living person, i.e., the actor, and not the dead abstraction of a person, i.e., the role.’
And it appears to me that, whether consciously or not, his approach seems to borrow heavily from our very own Natya Shastra—arguably the greatest text in the genre of performing arts. And yet, here we are ignoring our heritage and celebrating mediocrity in our country, especially in our industry. If I have Rs 25 crore, I can make any random dude into the greatest actor in this country. It is all fake. This is because most of our people do not use logic as much as they should, and that is because they don’t have enough knowledge. So it is very easy to brainwash them. Then they are bombarded with waves of propaganda claiming that this person really is the greatest actor, until they are hypnotized into believing it is the truth. Power and money talk more than merit.
A classic question they ask me in interviews is to name the actors who have inspired me. The actors who have actually inspired me are from foreign films, often not the well-known names. How do I name them to a journalist who is unaware of this actor, or the film he or she has acted in, or the director of the film? So they suggest a list of names and I pick any one of them. Our media does not have the right knowledge needed to ask good questions. How can we then expect the audience to know better? How can we expect this mediocrity to end?
So much is fake. So many stories are fake. So many people playing them are fake. The threshold is so, so low. Yes, changes are happening, but at a very superficial level. They are capturing performances at a physical level. Of the upcoming crop in mainstream Bollywood though, there is some hope. There is the amazing Kangana Ranaut, for instance. And mark my words: Ranbir Kapoor will perform wonders.
In NSD, which, as I say all the time, formed my foundation, I had about twenty batchmates. We had the same teachers, we studied the same books but all of us are in different places in life today. It took me a few years to learn that you have to leave NSD behind at some point and get involved in real life, in real emotions, in real people. This is not about a particular role. It is about an actor’s existence. The books you read, the people you hang out with, all of these deeply impact your acting. Eventually, you have to build your own style, your own gait, and all of these factors contribute to whether you are aware of it or not.
Of course, then there is the whole part of detaching from the character you have worked so bloody hard to get into so that you can rejuvenate yourself for a bit and then get into the next role. It’s like discarding old robes so that you can make room to wear new ones. For instance, for Manjhi: The Mountain Man I was stuck in the character of Dashrath Manjhi, well until one and a half months after the shooting had ended.
I have often been accused of playing a plethora of morbid roles. The word they use most often is ‘dark’. I fail to understand what they mean. Darkness is an integral part of life. When did light and dark become separate? They exist together in the universe, they are symbiotic. Where there are stars, there is night. Where there is sun, there are shadows. When people say Badlapur was dark or that Raman Raghav 2.0 was unreal, I am bewildered because they are not unreal. There are people just as ghoulish, actually even more so, walking all over the streets of India. And they have shades of innocence in them too, just like Liak in Badlapur.
There is no darkness left in my life, I have poured all the darkness, all the frustrations inside me into the dark characters I played. So in real life if somebody abuses me or slaps me, I would not give a damn. God has given everybody their share of everything, including angst. People like Anurag and me, we have taken out all of our angst on celluloid. So we are empty. Our profession is an enormous blessing that way. Because most others don’t have venues to channel their negativity. Their share of angst and negativity festers inside them until the pus bursts out in scary ways in real life: by cheating, duping people, usurping positions . . . the list is endless. My favourite thing about cinema is this: in real life, you have to often tell a load of white lies to cover stuff up, to be in the good books of those you care about. We show in real life only what we want to show and that too in the exact quantity that we want to reveal. So artifice has crept into people’s lives almost everywhere. But not in front of this amazing gadget we call the camera. During those few seconds when you are in front of it, just for those few seconds, you show nothing but sheer naked honesty. It is a boon from heaven for actors, only they can do this. So whichever character you get to play, you can speak truth through them, the truth you may not be able to say in real life.
Many people say I did that in the character of Kick, which was a so-called commercial film. But if I lived that character in real life, I would be exactly like I portrayed him on screen. You can be honest in the so-called commercial cinema too—it’s not like you can be honest only in more realistic cinema. Every role is sacred. The form could be anything, the actor’s duty is to play every genre with total honesty.
And honesty is not limited to acting. There is a boy called Sonu who comes to clean my office. He scrutinizes every corner, every little nook for a speck of dirt. He does his work with 100 per cent sincerity, with utmost honesty. This is a deep trait in every being. Everyone wants to express truth through whatever medium, even if it is not a creative medium like acting or music or writing. Through sheer honesty, one can excel in even a mechanical or seemingly mundane task. This truth, this excellence, this expression is something every human being yearns for.
* * *
These days I have forayed more into what many call ‘commercial cinema’, working with traditional superstars of Bollywood. A star is different from an actor. When people come to watch the film of, say, a Shah Rukh Khan or a Salman Khan, they are there to see Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan. They are not there to watch an actor. They are there to watch a star and all the things he represents. They have a certain magic about them that people cannot get enough of. When they go to watch their favourite superstar’s film, they want to forget their worries and get transformed into the magical energy of the superstar.
But what is a star? What is a superstar?
One of my seniors at NSD, a well-spoken intellectual guy, happened to become the chief assistant director in a film starring Rajinikanth. During a chat on the sets, Rajinikanth asked him, ‘Do you believe in God?’ My friend said, ‘No, I don’t. I am an atheist.’ But he proceeded to ask Rajinikanth, ‘Sir, do you believe in God?’
The superstar replied, ‘Yes, I believe in God.’
‘Why?’ asked my friend.
‘Because of the kind of person I am. A person with my kind of looks or the lack of them, could become a superstar. This means there is definitely a God.’
Rajinikanth is a legend and, like him, I too don’t possess the typical looks of a star. But I don’t quite agree with him. My belief is different. After all, what is a superstar? Somebody whom thousands of people love madly. Even if she o
r he commits blunders, they love the superstar unconditionally. That’s what happens with millions of people. But if you are a superstar and somebody like Nawaz is watching you, he might learn nothing from you: no skill or detailing or any other kind of knowledge. The superstar’s profession is not of an actor’s, but of a superstar’s. Because a guy obsessed with knowledge and craft watching your movie expects some detail of acting. Dude, do that please. Superstardom may also be a coincidence. To be a superstar, skill or craft is not a prerequisite, only image is. That image can be of anybody—a sportsperson, a model, even a party girl, really, anything at all.
It is wonderful that people like superstars so much. People love watching them. But I don’t want to be a superstar. I don’t want people to watch me. I want people to watch my craft. If they watch a Nawaz film, I want them to focus on the craft. How did he do this role?
If people like a certain image, it becomes rather easy to build upon that. Also, market forces tend to pigeonhole you into that, so it’s a pretty comfortable route to follow. For instance, take Gangs of Wasseypur again. I was appreciated in it. But what if I continued to play similar kinds of roles, maintaining a similar attitude? (I did get offered a string of similar roles.) Then I could have become a superstar very quickly. I could have played that kind of a gangster over and over again and of course, it would have been a piece of cake having done it so many times already.
An Ordinary Life Page 17