Naseeruddin Shah on doing selective films like Hope Aur Hum: 'I get all the rejected roles of Amitabh Bachchan'

Naseeruddin Shah is a master of words. One of cinema’s finest actors, he is an interviewer’s dream. He holds nothing back. He can whip out innumerable — happy as well as sad stories — from his illustrious career and life while laughing out uproariously at both, just that he is an impatient man and withdraws into a shell after sharing some lovely anecdotes and quotes that leave you surprised, baffled and at times, in awe and admiration. [caption id=“attachment_4443817” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  Naseeruddin Shah in a still from Hope Aur Hum. YouTube[/caption] Naseer says, he has always judged a script by its “cover” and he could not put the script of his upcoming,  Hope Aur Hum , down for a single minute. “I started reading Hope Aur Hum, I knew nothing about the director (ad filmmaker-turned-director Sudip Bandopadhyay) and I just instinctively decided that this film will be fun to do,” he said.  Hope Aur Hum is touted to be a simple family film that traces three generations of a tight-knit family in Mumbai. “I respond instinctively to scripts. If I don’t like what I am reading then I don’t read beyond 20 pages. There is a joke about a Hollywood producer. A writer sent a script to and it was returned to him rejected. The writer was angry and went to meet the producer saying he hasn’t even read his script and still rejected it because he had stapled from page 52 to 75, ‘and when I got the script back those pages were still stapled’. The producer replied, when he eats an egg at breakfast, ‘I don’t have to eat the whole egg if it’s bad’ (laughs). It is very funny with scripts…something about the cover gives me a vibration and I don’t read all the scripts that come to me. I gauge them by their covers. And any script which comes to me with my photograph as the character on the cover, I don’t bother to read because such scripts are bound to be useless and that’s why they need such kind of props,” said Naseer with a hearty laugh. But what miffs him the most is when scripts rejected by Amitabh Bachchan come to him, and being upfront that he is, he shows the door to such makers. “Normally they come to me if Mr Bachchan refuses the role. I get all the rejected roles of Mr Bachchan and I can make out that this was written for him. Of course, they don’t tell me but I caught couple of them because one of the scripts said, ‘He is a tall gentleman with a neat goatee and a baritone’. I asked the writer, ‘Who did you write this role for? Get out of here, I don’t even want to read this’ (laughs out loud). I only need to connect to my character and if I can empathise with it. I have to find that character within myself to say yes to a role,” said Naseer, who made his acting debut in Shyam Benegal’s 1975 film Nishant. In Hope Aur Hum, the veteran actor plays the patriarch of the family who clings on to his youth with a space-consuming out-of-order photocopy machine.  “I could relate to this character because, I, too, treasure old things and I have seen so many old-timers who get hysterical when their precious things are taken away. Some ragged pair of chappals which my mother had and she would use those chappals only. These are quite wonderful human characteristics and very few films touch on subjects like these. What is refreshing about this film is that there is no formulae, no clichéd situations, no fights, no songs and dances but there is plenty of drama and plenty of conflict. The story is chock full of emotions,” said Naseer. One of the icons of new Indian cinema, even as Naseer has done close to 300 films and has won numerous prestigious awards, including three National awards (for films Sparsh, Paar and Iqbal ) and also honored with both the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan, he is still hungry for good roles and envies the actors of today. “Young filmmakers of today are far more skillful, more committed, more savvy, exposed to much more than the ’70s filmmakers who I started with. They are making far better films today. Even the smaller films that don’t succeed so much like Aankhon Dekhi or Mukti Bhavan or Dum Laga Ke Haisha or Shubh Mangal Saavdhan are absolutely wonderful movies. They have been made by people who know the ethos they are filming. They have made UP cool, who would have thought that? Banaras was always cool but Bareilly and Aligarh have also become cool. I admire these young filmmakers and I envy the actors who are working with them because they are getting far better parts than we got. We always got the symbols of an angry man and this younger generation of actors are also quite superb,” said Naseer. The veteran actor is all praise for the box office charmers Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt. “Varun is a good actor, I have seen his film Badlapur. Girls like Alia are also experimenting and she is wonderful. So far, all her performances have been outstanding. They are educated and that is important. Actors like Varun and Alia don’t only go by how many zeroes there will be in the box office collection which is a good thing. I hope more and more young actors follow that,” said Naseer. This brings us to Bollywood’s obsession with box office figures. “The filmmakers have always been jittery about it. Now it is out in the open,” he said. [caption id=“attachment_2522494” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  Naseeruddin Shah. Facebook[/caption] Naseer is impressed by the work of quite a few directors of present times. “Shoojit Sircar and Dibakar Banerji are absolutely fantastic. Vikramaditya Motwane is wonderful. Zoya Akhtar is a fine director. I would like to work with them but I won’t go out of my way to woo them and say, ‘Please take me’. If they consider me right for a part, I will do it.  It wouldn’t depend upon the length of the part. It will be something that they see me in but no way am I going to express my desire to work with any of them because then they will be under pressure when they write my part,” he said. Naseer’s flirtations with commercial cinema have always come under the scrutiny of the torch-bearers of serious cinema. While his earlier forays into the song and dance routine that fell flat was spared the jibes, his successful commercial films beginning with Tridev was not taken to very kindly by the arty brigade and was trashed by them with gusto. “I didn’t consider those films trash, I thought they would be popular but they turned out to be trash. Lot of art films turned out to be trash as well. But it didn’t bother anyone. But for some reason, after my Tridev became a success then suddenly I became a traitor to the art films’ cause and I don’t know why. The fact is that I was always doing commercial films. My fourth film was a film called Sunayana made by Rajshri Productions in which I sang and danced around trees very badly. Then I have done other films also at that time and none of them succeeded so it didn’t trouble anybody. But when my commercial films started to run then everybody started saying, ‘Arre, he should be starving, why is he getting hit films? “said Naseer, laughing out loud. In the coming months, Naseer will get busy completing his films – Anant Mahadevan’s The Storyteller and The Tashkent Files (a thriller about the mysterious death of former prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri) besides getting involved in theatre. “I am planning to do two new plays this year. I just love theatre. I can’t do without it. I love acting in plays more than the movies because theatre’s a living organism whereas movie is a mummified thing which you have shot and edited. Films stay like that forever but theatre you can keep chopping, changing and improving. It is like looking after a tree, you just watch it grow, new leaves come out every day and that is really the joy of the theatre,” saying so, Naseer signs off with a broad smile.