EXCLUSIVE | Manoj Bajpayee says he hasn't 'worked with great or senior directors': 'There are some names like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Yash Chopra but...'

Finally we have escaped from the clutches of those massy superheroes that are gratified by the idea of fighting 50 people together in slow motion. In director Kanu Behl’s Despatch, which is streaming on Zee5, Manoj Bajpayee plays a print journalist coming to terms with the arrival of the digital world. His whole professional and personal conflicts unfold in slow-motion. Behl, along with co-writer Ishani Banerjee, is in no rush to keep the momentum going.

In an exclusive interview with Firstpost, Manoj Bajpayee, Kanu Bahl, Shahana Goswami, and Arrchita Agarwaal spoke about their film that releases on Zee5 on December 13.

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Edited excerpts from the interview

Manoj Bajpayee, my first question is that in these last 30 years since you have been working as an actor, how much have you seen journalism evolve.

I’ve seen it evolve and I have seen it dissolve. The publication houses, the big ones, big buildings, so many questions being asked just when you were about to enter. It used to be that kind of a sacrosant place. But now suddenly, social media has democratised it, and has kind of given another dimension to it. Everything is about social media, everything is about phone, the supremacy of the print is almost gone. So that is something I have seen it grow and I have seen seen all of it feed a dealing of a heavy bit.

Shahana , be it Zwigato or Rock On or Despatch, how do you portray the plight of a wife convincingly. How do you get into the nuances of your characters?

I love listening to stories and when I listen to stories, I imagine putting myself in each person’s shoes. That is also something that I, as a human being, have always been curious about, wondering what makes somebody see the way they are. And not from a point of judgment, but from a point of trying to understand what makes somebody do what they do. And I think that’s kind of served me as an actor because when I come across a character, there is an automatic sense of empathy and understanding that I have for that character as as if I’m talking to another human being or as I’m interacting with someone where I’m trying to see the circumstances in which they are behaving and interacting in a way.

And of course, there is so much help that comes from the writing, from the director, from your co-actor, from the discussions that you have. So it’s not a solo process, I mean, what you see on screen of somebody as an actor is not just their work. It is the work of a lot of other people and a lot of other aspects of collaboration that have come together in the final fruition of me exhibiting it, but I’m not the solely responsible for creation of everything in that.

Arrchita, how was your prep for your character?

I have done a lot of unlearning, understood myself. I think that was my this thing. So that was the most challenging.

Kanu, how did you prepare for this film as a director?

I think it took about 18 months of research, meeting a lot of journalists, both crime and not non-crime journalists, meeting a lot of lawyers, meeting some people from the underworld, some cops and just getting the basic lay of the land, so that the background can feel as authentic as possible. And of course, the period of research that we were doing was also helping us sort of zero in on what were we trying to say through these characters. Like what is this film really about? God shaped a lot through those 18 months of research that Ishani and me did because we realized that there are there are two sort of approaches into the film.

One is the larger world that we live in today, which we started realizing as we were on our research that it’s becoming so much more foggier and foggier and foggier because in today’s world, you do not know who has done what crime and why. It’s getting almost impossible to know that. And that emerged as a really interesting insight and we said, okay, no one has looked at this world through that lens. So what if it’s about not finding anything? We also wanted to really look at a journalist’s life as more of a human being because it’s more looking at him through a lens of a flawed, fallible human being.

Manoj, you have such iconic death scenes in your filmography, Satya, Kaun, Aks, Gangs Of Wasseypur, and now Despatch. And there is always an element of surprise. What goes making these death scenes so convincing?

The credit goes to the directors. You can give me credit for one thing that I have been very, very persistent when it came to chasing few directors and Kanu Behl is one of them. Just really holding his hand and, you know, and taking him forward, definitely that purely selfish reason that I want to be a part of his creation because he has a vision, which is going to eventually help me. If you look at me, I haven’t worked with great or senior directors. Yes, there are some names like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Yash Chopra. When I worked with Ram Gopal Varma, he was a a young director, and then after that, I worked with mostly the young directors of their times, the people who wrote their new chapter in direction.

Also, what fascinated you about your character Joy?

That’s a good question, I never thought about it. You know what is the best thing about a script, that you know it is on the surface of it, there is one genre that you can see, but you know that it’s not going to be about that. It is a going to be about something else. Those kinds of really fascinate me a lot.

Shahana, when you read the script of Despatch and your character, the conflicts she goes through. Did you ask Kanu or yourself why her husband is so toxic to her and why she’s the one always making the effort to save the marriage?

I never see any relationship dynamic to be a result of only one. And neither do I see it being something where with a think that it’s only the other person’s. I think there’s a constant pull and push between them and in the scenes we see perhaps it seems more like her wanting to save the marriage, but I think there was always an innate knowing that there have been times before that when he has tried to save the marriage. And that is the nature of these kinds of endings to relationships that there is always a mistiming in the way you express emotion in what you want from that equation in that moment.

So there’s just this kind of misalignment that has been playing out and the juncture at which you see the misalignment is when he is pulling away. And yet there is a moment of maybe giving in there, a moment of some sort of a hope developing for a second, which vaguely disappears again. And there are different moments, even in the first scene when he comes, he is making an attempt to come and sit with the friends after she said, “I don’t know why you doing this. He does give into some tiny bit of emotion and sensuality and attachment that he still has seen where they end up making love. So there are movements constantly of two people trying.

Manoj, which is that one thing about entertainment journalism that you all would like to change or that something that can be done better?

Is journalism left nowadays? We should go back to the old days of journalism when it used to have its own very strong identity. Everything is now being told to us, if you want your film to be featured anywhere there is a price to it. The journalism of the 90s was unbreakable. There must be some other truth. I am not aware of it.