In Ramapriya, a dilapidated theatre in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, for the first time I began to understand the phenomenon of Amitabh Bachchan.
In Khuddar, Amitji barges into a discotheque where his liar of a brother is grooving away with a girl. He looks at his brother with hurt-soaked eyes, a gang of bouncers move towards him. He warns them that he will break their legs if they try to stop him. The audience gasped.
Not many in Vijaywada can follow Hindi. Yet they could connect to his anger and the hurt he communicated through his body language, voice and eyes.
Everyone in the audience wanted a brother or a friend or a leader like him. When I realised my dream of working with Amitji in Sarkar, I began to see a very different side to him. Behind the obvious power and intensity, there was a vulnerability. As a filmmaker I became greedy and dumb enough to experiment with him as an actor which resulted in Nishabd and Aag.
Amitji’s make-up man, Deepak, told me on day one of the shooting of Nishabd that it would flop. No one would accept Amitji in a role of a man attracted to a nubile girl. Perhaps as a viewer, I wouldn’t like that either. Yet I think it is Amitji’s finest performance. It demanded complexities which the so-called art-house actors won’t even begin to understand in their lifetime.
Similarly in Aag, as a director I can judge an actor by what he does with the material given to him. The viewer merely sees the final result, without knowing that I could have botched up the screenplay, made a mess of the editing, and miscellaneous blunders. The audience reacts to the effect, whereas I know the cause. If anyone argues that Amitji had no business to do such a film, yes he is guilty of misplacing his trust in me. But he is not guilty of not doing his best.
Being an ultra-professional, he succumbs to the vision or the lack of vision of the director. His close-up at the end of Nishabd, when Jiah Khan is leaving in the climax, demanded an extraordinary understanding of human emotions, compared to him saying “Tujhe bhi karne nahin doonga” (“I won’t let you do that either”) in Sarkar. But sadly, the impact of that line in Sarkar will become cinematic history but Nishabd’s close-up might go unnoticed.
He has never ever failed as an actor. It’s only directors, including myself, who fail. Karan Johar’s favourite films of his are Silsila and Kabhie Kabhie. I loathe Silsila which I compare to my favourites Deewaar and Zanjeer. I dislike seeing Amitji in movies like Last Lear and Black whereas Rituparno Ghosh and Sanjay Leela Bhansali might not want to make a Nishabd with him.
Amitji allows himself to be molded in any which way by the director. And that’s why everyone of us wants him as a brother or a friend, the way they did years ago at the Ramapriya in Vijayawada.