For the past 35 years, veteran actor Danny Denzongpa had a particular condition when signing a film — he won’t shoot in Mumbai from April till June every year. “I am from the hills and the Mumbai heat gets into my mind and I feel distracted. I would be sweating and that would ruin my mood. Everyone in the industry knows about my clause,” says the 70-year-old who has retreated to his hometown in Sikkim where his days are “very pleasant, relaxed and happy”. The actor will be soon seen in Bioscopewala , based on Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Kabuliwala that traces the bond between Rehmat Khan, an Afghan dryfruit seller and Mini, a young girl who reminds him of his own daughter back home. Denzongpa was eight years old when he saw Bimal Roy’s Hindi version in 1961 with Balraj Sahni playing the Kabuliwala. “I read Tagore in school and when I saw the film, I was deeply touched.” Unlike Roy’s film, Bioscopewala is set in the 1980s. Mini, now a grown-up sets off to find her childhood bioscopewala and his daughter. “The story has been updated but the soul of the film remains the same, so are the relationships between Rehmat Khan, Mini and her father,” he reveals.
Role playing
Denzongpa who has earlier been cast as an Afghan in films such as Dharmatma, Khuda Gawah and Sanam Bewafa believes that his Mongolian features made him suitable to play a native of Afghanistan. “If you go to the Northern part of Afghanistan, you will find many who look like me. My roles in Sanam Bewafa and Khuda Gawah were much appreciated by the audience and that’s why writers and directors feel I am suitable to play these roles,” he adds. But his features didn’t stop other directors from casting him as the long-lost brother and father of the lead in the 70s and 80s. The actor has played Shashi Kapoor’s brother in Fakira , Vinod Khanna’s half-brother in Lahu Ke Do Rang and Mithun Chakraborty’s brother in Hum Se Badkar Kaun, to name a few . “ I have played Mithun’s father, brother, friend and even his enemy and all the films were accepted. The audience was generous in those days and if the storyline was convincing, they would accept us in any role,” he says adding that initially, he was also sceptical if he would be able to look convincing in the supporting roles. “I was a student of Film Institute [FTII] and initially found it very funny that the directors wanted to cast me as the long-lost brother of the hero. I soon realised that once you are accepted by the audience, you can play any part.” After coming to the film industry, Denzongpa also had to “unlearn everything” he learnt at FTII. “We were encouraged to go for method acting but after two-three films, I realised that the industry didn’t consider [you to be a ] good actor if you [weren’t] into loud and over-the-top acting. Natural acting was very rarely accepted in commercial films,” he recalls.
Donning many hats
Despite back-to-back films, the actor was soon tired of playing similar roles in action films that had similar plots and props. At one point, he was working double shifts, juggling two films that weren’t very different from each other. “I wanted to quit and do something else so I stopped signing films. That’s when N.N. Sippy offered me Phir Wohi Raat to direct,” he adds. Phir Wahi Raat, a horror-thriller is about a woman haunted by nightmares of her insane aunt goes back to her ancestral home where her mother was murdered. “When I read the script, I was hooked. It gave me an opportunity to experiment with different aspects of filmmaking,” he says of his directorial debut that was a commercial hit in 1980. Soon, prominent producers started approaching him to direct but the scripts he was being offered were exactly similar to the ones he had been working on.
Instead, the actor decided to focus on his acting and run his brewery Yuksom which is now in Sikkim, Assam and Orissa. “I travel for work and meetings. Otherwise, I keep myself busy with trekking, gardening and painting,” he says.
