If you guys were your characters in real life, what would you want to do? Take on bad guys or have a superpower?
Deepika : I want to be a massive vacuum cleaner. I said that, I’m obsessed with cleaning and everything being clean. It bothers me to a point where I start cleaning other people’s spaces. As a child I was always invited to my friend’s place for sleepovers not because they wanted me there, because the mothers knew in the morning I would clean up their rooms. That’s what I feel like doing.
Vin Diesel: I’d want to be a giant blender and to complement the vacuum cleaner. Two-for-one sale.
Deepika: We’d clean and then we’d blend.
Do you think you’ve got your due at the Oscars?
Vin Diesel: I don’t think the Oscars have gotten around to processing the fact that performers in action films, can give performances. I dare say they are prejudice there. I remember I worked with Sidney Lumet on a film called Find Me Guilty (2006) and he talked about that. He’d often say there was a prejudice against beautiful women in Hollywood and beautiful women were less likely to be given accolades.
Action hero is a relatively new term. Films like Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild One and you can go further back to Clark Gable , the action hero term didn’t exist. It was something that came out of the 80s with Arnold (Schwarzenegger) and Sly (Sylvester Stallone) and it is a relatively new term. I don’t think the Oscars have caught up to that yet and they still maintain the prejudice. And it’s kind of preposterous because the whole world was moved by Furious 7. I don’t make my movies for accolades, I make my movies for people. I don’t carry the elitist approach to movies and I make my movies for everyone. I want to offer an escapism to everyone and not take an elitist approach that the Oscars so often does.
Deepika, you have spent 10 years in the industry, how has your journey been?
Well I look at it as a beautiful journey. When I think back on how I started or how I first walked on to a film set, I had no idea of anything - cameras, lighting, what even acting is. I was there as an actor but I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was given lines and I did what I had to do. I have learnt over the years, everything that I do on the camera and everything otherwise on set, I’ve learnt on set.
It’s been an amazing journey not just professionally, even personally. I’m fortunate to be in a business where I get to interact and meet so many different people, play so many characters, travel the world and eat different kinds of food and it enriches me as a person in so many ways, all of that has contributed to who I am.
Reviews have said that Deepika matches her co-star blow for blow. How do you react to that?
Vin Diesel: That sounds like the article has been a success. It’s the intention. That’s what she had to do and does more and I think that’s the easy part. I think what you see her do in the movie and the role that she plays in the storytelling is even more significant than that.
Deepika : I think it just brings me back the day our first trailer released and everyone said I had a blink-and-miss role and I guess I don’t need to say anything after that.
Vin Diesel: Once you see the movie, you put your heart and soul in the movie and there will always be people too quick to write it off and be disparaging. But that’s part of the world that we live in the fun is waiting till you wait to get to see the movie and see how happy you are.
