Like in Raees, in my first scene I am at the desk taking my own sweet time fiddling with a pen and then writing with it, purposely portraying the caricature of pretentious busyness while Shah Rukh is waiting, getting more and more restless with my endless dilly-dallying. Before the scene, he had told me, ‘Nawaz Bhai, you do whatever you need to do. Tell me what I need to do.’ Of course, Shah Rukh is known for his intelligence. He hails from a theatre background and in his early days worked with directors like Ketan Mehta and Mani Kaul. But can you imagine a superstar like him having a conversation like this? Some decades ago, no superstar would have done this. These are all new and extremely welcome trends. Everyone wins this way, most of all cinema and the audience.
* * *
We spend so much of our lives waiting. Waiting in lines, waiting for responses, waiting for work, love, and so on. With actors, there is another kind of waiting added to the list. It is part of our day-to-day job. We spend a great deal of our time waiting for the shot to get ready. We wait in our vanity vans or directly on the set while the production team is hard at work. But we wait. And during those waits, every now and then a cute little treat or an adventure pops up. After the movie is over it becomes a memory etched in your mind like a picture in an old photo album.
Like when we were shooting Freaky Ali on one of those acid-hot afternoons. After finishing a delicious lunch, we were hanging out, taking in the divine air conditioning as we waited to be called for our shot. Other than the team of our film, the golf course was almost desolate, with just half a dozen golfers or so playing on the giant course. The heat was that vicious! An elderly fellow actor too was unwinding during our time out. His age appeared to be close to eighty and his beard, though straw-coloured and thin like his structure, appeared to be like that of Santa Claus.
The actor Arbaaz Khan who is known for his humour goofily questioned him about his ‘machinery’.
‘Chacha, is your machinery in place? Or has it rusted with age?’
‘It is in excellent condition!’ he responded immediately in a voice as skeletal as his frame.
Arbaaz led him on.
‘Wow! That is incredible. What is your secret?’
‘Chuaara!’ he quipped promptly, referring to dried dates. ‘Soak two to four chuaara in milk and have this mixture for forty days.’
‘Forty days ka course. Aur phir intercourse?’ Arbaaz asked.
‘Absolutely!’ he assured. By now he had earned the moniker of Chacha Chuaara.
‘Is it as effective as Viagra?
Immediately, Chacha Chuaara shook his grand old head in disapproval.
‘Viagra is poison, beta. Have chuaara!’
Arbaaz teased him further.
‘Lekin hume deewar cheerke jaana hai. Chuaara kaafi hai?’ (But we have to break through walls, Chacha. Will chuaara suffice?)
‘With chuaara, your “machinery” will become as strong as a drilling machine. You can drill a hole inside a road,’ he assured. ‘Remember, it is called chu-aara. Chu (meaning touch), aara (meaning an electric saw). Chuaara! That’s how powerful it is. You don’t know its power until you have tried it.’
* * *
Strangely enough, now I don’t like theatre so much any more. Because there are so many tiny nuances, countless subtleties that theatre cannot depict no matter how hard it tries. If you are playing a bad guy, a villain, or if it is very hot, you need to say it, either through loud dialogues or through gestures, on stage to convey it to the audience. In Shakespeare’s famous play The Tempest, for example, we have to scream that a storm is coming and so we need to run.
Theatre is a literal, loud medium. In cinema, you can show it all by conveying your character’s feelings without having to literally say it. Again, let’s take the legendary speech in Hamlet, ‘To be or not to be’. In cinema, there is no need for this speech in the first place. You don’t need to literally spell out the character’s dilemma. It is incredible! Cinema is a wonderful medium that is very personal and private. In cinema, I can express what is going on in my character’s mind without all of that pomp and show. You move your eyebrow and it conveys so much. You look sideways or your eyelids drop or you sigh . . . all of these are big deals on screen. This cannot happen in theatre. In reel life, the audience can read your mind just like people can in real life. In cinema, I can go to your room, I can watch you clandestinely. The magic of the 70mm screen is that not only does it show you, it also shows what is going on inside you.
An actor should not mug up his or her dialogues. It is unnecessary if you have a feel of your character. And what’s more critical than the words themselves is silence. The absence of words or sound can create terror, romance, joy—an infinite range of emotions. The most difficult acting occurs in silence. It’s like in life, when, say, there is a conflict and we don’t talk at all. But our thoughts run amok. A tornado of turmoil swirls within us and the silence communicates all of it with the still sharpness of a sword.
20Success
Earlier, I used to get roles where I would get beaten up, like in Sarfarosh. After doing that and so many other films where I had just one scene—to get beaten up in—I’d go to Budhana and notice that my beloved Abbu was consciously avoiding me. He would not talk to me, often he would walk away. When it came to his emotions, my father was not a
