He played Inspector Purohit, a reinterpretation of the Witches, in Maqbool (2003), Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Then in 2006, in Omkara , Bhardwaj’s version of Othello , Naseeruddin Shah was the Indian Duke of Venice, as Bhaisaab, a politician. His latest, Bornila Chatterjee’s The Hungry , now relocates Titus Andronicus to a bloody wedding in contemporary Delhi. Meanwhile, Shah’s stage production of The Father , Christopher Hampton’s English translation of contemporary French playwright Florian Zeller’s Le Pere , is running to packed houses in Mumbai. During a backstage interview at National Centre for the Performing Arts’ Experimental Theatre, the actor-director was his characteristic outspoken, blunt and provocative self.
Your new film [The Hungry] is an adaptation of Shakespeare’sTitus Andronicus…
Titus is a play I hadn’t read. No one has read it. I knew the story; it is one those ghastly tales. Then I saw this film by Peter Weir called The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover which is a kind of Titus Andronicus where he cooks the guy and serves him on the table towards the end. I had also seen a version with Anthony Hopkins made by a great woman director. I have forgotten her name [ Titus by Julie Taymor]. She has also done The Lion King [for the Broadway] and some other great plays.
So what attracted you to the film?
I was very moved by the script. Not by the fact that it’s Shakespeare and all that. Shakespeare being done in Hindi films is nothing new. Parsi theatre, Nautanki, they were all reworking Hamlet , King Lear and so on. It evoked for me a world that I am familiar with. I am from a place called Sardhana, which is near Meerut. It is a tiny tehsil, which my great grandfather was rewarded with by the British for fighting in 1857. He was a soldier of fortune. He came from Afghanistan. He fought for whoever paid him more. He was rewarded with the title of Khan Bahadur. I saw the remnants of that feudal society when I was a child. Servants were whipped and women were consigned to the burqa. They did not step out of the house, including my mom. It didn’t end at this; there was other ghastly stuff that happened in many other landowning families. And not only landowning families, industrialists in small towns, gangsters and politicians in small towns who live like absolute undisputed kings—the film is set in that kind of a world.
It was shot in Hapur, a tiny town between Aligarh and Delhi. It is famous for nothing except its papad. And the papad is also not that good I have to say! There is this 300-year-old castle called Mud Fort Kuchesar in Hapur.
I had never been there even though I have passed through Hapur a zillion times. I studied in Aligarh and lived in Meerut. I was astounded by the place. It just seemed like a lot of good energy coming together. The girl turned out to be an ace director. The other actors were wonderful—Tisca Chopra, Karan Pandit, Neeraj Kabi and some new people.
You said that no one has readTitus. What is it about the play? Is it the macabre, bloody nature of it?
It’s not a feel-good play, it’s not [about] happy endings. Nor is it known as one of the great tragedies. The main character is such a son of a b****, sorry for my French, but you don’t feel sorry for the guy. You do feel bad about Othello. You feel terrible about Hamlet. Macbeth, I am ambivalent about. I don’t like that play, in fact. I don’t think there are tragic dimensions to the protagonist in Titus . He is power hungry and nakedly ambitious. He will stop at nothing. There are no great speeches in it, no heart-rending moments, there is no love lost and separation. There is one gory incident after another. I feel Shakespeare himself was finding his feet as a dramatist, seeing what works and what does not. It’s not surprising that it hasn’t even been done often abroad. It’s the one that [Lawrence] Olivier didn’t do. He has done perhaps the whole canon otherwise.
You worked with Vishal on Macbeth and Omkara ; and now with Bornila on Titus . How do their approaches differ to the same playwright?
I think Vishal was more concerned with making successful movies because he took major liberties with Othello, which I didn’t really like. My argument was that if you are using all the Hindi cinema tropes, which he does, then why dispense with the greatest trope of all, the magnificent battle between the hero and the villain? That’s the biggest trope of all popular cinema whether Ben Hur or Ten Commandments or The Godfather . But he takes the liberty of having Iago’s wife kill him, which is not in the play at all. I have to say that apart from Maqbool I have not been impressed with Omkara or Haider .
It’s a standard question… What is it about Shakespeare and cinema?
Shakespeare is a seminal story-teller. I don’t think he imagined he was writing classics or that he was writing great poetry. I don’t think he dreamt his work would be staged 400 years after he died. He was writing popular plays. So it’s it is not wrong of Vishal to make popular movies out of them. Movies have borrowed hugely from Shakespeare—all the comic clichés, mistaken identities, man masquerading as a woman, woman masquerading as a man, rich boy poor girl, every damn thing. If you try to tell the story of Hamlet to somebody what will it sound like? The story of a man who doesn’t do anything. Shakespeare had a way with words. His stories aren’t that great. Or may be they don’t seem so great now because they have been so copiously emulated and copied, reworked and readapted, reinterpreted and retold.
You think Bornila has been more faithful to Shakespeare?
She hasn’t been utterly faithful to the text. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that but I think she has got to the core of what Shakespeare was getting at, that ruthlessness will only lead to disaster. They are utterly ruthless characters, all of them. He kills his own son in the first scene.
Did you recoil at having to be so negative?
I love it. Playing the good guy is boring. I love twisted, flawed characters. Unfortunately, there are so few written, and written well. Our writers can’t resist the tendency to paint such a character all black. That’s no fun.
As an actor how different is it to do Shakespeare on stage as opposed to playing him on the big screen?
I don’t think I’ve have done much Shakespeare on stage. I did in school, but one doesn’t really count that. I did Merchant of Venice , Macbeth and King Lear when I was 14, 15 and 16. Through college I didn’t, but I studied [him], I did literature in Aligarh. I had read Julius Caesar, Henry V and As You Like It already in school. In college I was introduced to Absurd Theatre, which really blew my mind. I thank my lucky stars for meeting these two teachers who introduced me to Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Then I went to National School of Drama and acted in a production of Othello in Urdu by [Ebrahim] Alkazi which, looking back now I feel was not a very perceptive production. The translation was ghastly. It occurred to me that Shakespeare in translation sounds ridiculous. When you translate you need to find another idiom, you can’t translate literally. Everybody does it out of reverence for Shakespeare. These are the kind of translations I encountered all the time in Delhi because Alkazi had sworn to do productions only in Hindustani. So he would translate great plays like Danton’s Death and Three Penny Opera and Caucasian Chalk Circle in to Hindustani and do them. His productions were really grand but the translations sounded totally absurd to me all the time. I was 21-22 then but even then I felt that it wasn’t working. Othello’s last speech, for instance, where he tells Desdemona: “Put out the light and then put out the light.” How the hell do you translate that? “ Roshni bujha do aur phir roshni bujha do ?” This is not what Shakespeare meant. So I came to the conclusion that to translate Shakespeare you need another Shakespeare. So I didn’t translate Shakespeare on stage. I have done one production of Julius Caesar with a cast of 70 people. It was a monumental disaster. It wiped us out financially, didn’t run for more than ten shows. It’s difficult to find actors who can read that poetry. I’d rather do something in Hindustani, or do something contemporary, Indian or a play in which the nationality of the characters doesn’t matter.
And Rajat Kapoor also has been doing Shakespeare…
Rajat’s I like a lot. His initial attempts, the gibberish I loved.
That [gibberish] takes care of the translation problem for you, doesn’t it?
Correct. Rajat doesn’t like spoken words, so he says. So he resorted to gibberish which was fine. Hamlet, The Clown Prince was actually in gibberish. I have seen Hamlet… at least five times. I loved it so much. Every time I saw it there was less gibberish. It was being replaced by French accents and Italian accents which I thought was unnecessary… (performs a bit of the To Be Or Not To Be speech with an Italian accent)… If you want to say “to be or not to be” say it properly or don’t say it. That’s what has been disappointing about his subsequent work. That he is resorting more and more to funny accents. Dispensing with Shakespeare’s beautiful words and replacing them with funny accents; I don’t think that is justified.
Young filmmakers seem to be energising you these days…
It moves me deeply when a young boy or girl comes to me and say they want to make a movie with me. It touches me so much though I have to hold myself back than impulsively say yes to everyone. I know what it is to try and make your first movie. Even after working for 25 years as an actor I know the kind of humiliations I had to face when making my own film [ Yun Hota To Kya Hota, 2006]. You never know, you go by instinct anyway. It sometimes goes right, sometimes goes wrong. It’s the roll of the dice.
The minute I met them I had decided I am working with these people. I was very impressed not just with the way Bornila had her stuff worked out. I haven’t met a more hard-working director who would go running up three flights of stairs to brief her actors and come running down all the way to where the camera was placed. She was very well organised, her shoot was a delight and weather was fabulous. It was January.
There was a time when you represented the young Indian cinema. What changes do you see between young cinema then and now?
I think it’s much more evolved now. These filmmakers are far savvier than those of the 70s and the 80s. Craft-wise, technique-wise they are better, and are far better storytellers. They are not posing as intellectuals like many of the 70s’ guys. They are not posing as committed people. They are making films on subjects that matter to them. Look at the Marathi movies. Fantastic! There was a time we thought Marathi cinema was doomed with Dada Kondke ruling the roost. But just look at the way it has blossomed.
Is there anything going wrong with the young cinema of today?
Their tendency to give in to the lure of the big banners, if it’s [the first film] successful. If it’s festival type then it’s okay. Even the young man who made Fandry and Sairat , I fear for him. What wonderful movies he made! Doesn’t he realise what Bollywood is going to do to Sairat? I dread to think of what they’ll do to the film.
You talked about the intellectualism of the 70s. All said and done, there was an engagement with politics in cinema back then. Do you think it’s happening now too, when politics has become much more problematic?
It will come about a lot. I think at that time a lot of it was sham. What do you know about mill mazdoors, for god’s sake, living in Altamount Road. Take Trapped for example. I think it’s absolutely fantastic. He (Vikramaditya Motwane) is not making a social comment, but talking about a subject preying on his mind and he wants to get it out of his system. It is something that could easily happen to anyone in the city. I wouldn’t say that there is no political awareness. There isn’t as much pamphleteering as in films like Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai. It’s become more nuanced I’d say, where you don’t have to have, like in Aakrosh , an explanatory scene at the end when the old and the young lawyer speak their minds finally. Even at that time I felt that it didn’t need that scene.
Is the engagement with politics in the young cinema a reflection of the times?
It is to do with the exposure to world cinema. Now you can catch any film made anywhere in the world. Those days it wasn’t so easy to access movies.
There is also the politics of money and finance. The crowdfunding attempts today. Didn’t they also happen back then? Aren’t the young filmmakers also deriving their vision from that era?
I think not. They are deriving their vision from the lives they are leading. Otherwise we would have seen a lot more movies being made about the plight of adivasis or things like that. As far as making movies about cow vigilantism is concerned it will happen in due course.
The mainstream cinema seems to be catering to the agenda very easily…
They know which side their bread is buttered, quite simply, so they are playing the sycophant’s role to the hilt.
For someone like you who wouldn’t want to be aligned how difficult or easy is it to manage?
You would have a dilemma if something that was blatant propaganda came your way. I would have a dilemma and would have no compunction about turning it down. But if there was a film with a progressive subject, like say Toilet : Ek Prem Katha . I haven’t seen it, I am told it is pretty compromised, but at least it has a subject worth lauding. If it had come to me, I could have said yes. You go by your instincts. How the film will turn out, you have no idea.
So when will your instinct tell you to direct again?
Movies? No.
You are happy directing plays?
A play is a living thing. You can watch it again and again. You can change it, alter it. Even after 10 years of doing a play you can keep improving it. Every performance is different. I have heard so many stage actors complain that they get bored after 10 shows. That’s too bad. Then you should not be in theatre. Or find a way to not get bored. Did you ever hear Sunil Gavaskar say that he gets bored of batting? In cinema it is all signed, sealed and delivered. A play is a living organism. It’s sheer joy. Can’t say that about too many movies. There have been a small number of films that I have enjoyed.
Can you list them?
Mirza Ghalib, Masoom, Bhavani Bhavai , my first two films — Nishant and Manthan — Monsoon Wedding …
Not Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro?
Oh, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was a bloody nightmare. We had ₹5 lakh to make that film, and none of us was famous. None of us had a car or a home. Satish Shah was the only one who had a home, so we used to all pile on him. I had just gotten married, so I brought food from home. The others were all strugglers — Om (Puri), Pankaj (Kapur)… living as paying guests here and there. Satish and I would bring flasks of juice and khana from home. It was an NFDC (National Film Development Corporation of India) production and you know what NFDC productions are like. Shooting on the streets, shooting 24 hours at a stretch. I thought it was the stupidest film ever made. I was into method acting and all that, at that time. And I kept arguing with Kundan (Shah) that this has got no logic, it isn’t going to be funny. And Kundan would say just ask us to do it. We would have these raging arguments but ultimately Kundan would have his way and I am glad he had his way. I did give him a lot of grief unnecessarily. I didn’t know any better. Frankly, I had no hope for that film.
But when I saw the film I thought you all would have had such a rollicking time…
I think if we had found ourselves too funny the film wouldn’t have been funny. The only thing I found funny was what Satish Shah was doing. I was there for the coffin scene with Om and Satish. We were holding back crowds. It was three in the morning and there were around a thousand people standing around and gaping. No one knew who anybody was. We were holding back people — Ravi, Deepak [Qazir], and Pavan Malhotra who was the production manager, and I. If you look at it carefully there is only one angle that we could get. We couldn’t move the camera at all. Even then, watching these two was hilarious. Satish, of course, I have always found delightful but Om’s comic abilities were a revelation.
The absurdity of the film still holds true for the times we are in…
The time is ripe for another film like that. I won’t say a sequel because it can’t be made again. It just happened.
He himself couldn’t repeat the brilliance in his subsequent films…
Never again. He did write a script for the sequel. It wasn’t quite working. The corruption he would have to deal with now is like multiplied umpteen a zillion times from than in 1982 when we made this film. I understand that Kundan spent himself in that [film], he said everything he had to say but why wasn’t anyone else be moved enough to make a film like that? Nobody dared write such a script.
