‘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
