It’s a day off from shooting and Shriya Saran is game for a conversation over breakfast. She discusses work, her love for Kathak and everything else. The girlish, infectious enthusiasm is tempered occasionally when she searches for politically correct words to articulate her thoughts.
We begin with Gautamiputra Satakarni , her high point this year when she stunned as Vashishti Devi. “It was a blessing. I fell in love with my part during (director) Krish’s four-hour narration. I started visualising the film. My friends would ask me what this part was and I would struggle to explain it briefly because there are so many layers,” she says.
When it goes awry
Visualisation, Shriya feels, can be a boon and a bane. In Gautamiputra …, the journey was rewarding. There have been cases where it hasn’t been so. She recalls Pavithra . “It’s great to imagine and visualise while reading a novel. It doesn’t always work for a film. Pavithra had a good script executed badly,” she says.
The said film had her playing a prostitute and the portrayal skewed towards voyeurism. “I had emotional breakdowns and would cry for days before going to shoot. Scenes were being rewritten and shot differently. At one point, my mom was disturbed seeing me cry.”
The lesson she learnt was not to choose a project only by its story and script, “Some of the biggest hits have had simple stories narrated beautifully. You need to trust the director more than the story.”
There was a phase in her career, when the high of doing Sivaji with Rajinikanth was followed by a frustrating delay in the release of eight of her films. Dilip Mehta’s Cooking with Stella and Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children were among them. “On several occasions I tried to do different films — Life is Beautiful , Mogudu Pellam O Dongodu and A Belly Full of Dreams for example. It’s a constant struggle to reinvent yourself and stay relevant,” she says.
Manam put her back on her course, spearheaded by director Vikram Kumar, with whom she did her first film, Ishtam . She remembers the five to six hour phone narration Vikram gave her. “Before Manam released, I didn’t accept any other Telugu film. I put a lot at stake because I believed in that project.”
Reality check
Her dusky portrayal of a village belle in the film harked back to her learning from Midnight’s Children . Once, as part of a workshop, she visited slums pretending to be a journalist. No one responded. One day, as she waited on a porch for a social worker, a lady told her ‘how do you expect me to talk when you don’t eat our food?’ Shriya accepted her meal of rice and dal and then the lady opened up, narrating incidents from her life that were similar to that of Parvathy (Shriya’s character in Midnight’s Children ). She also commented that Shriya would be a misfit for the part. “I was taken aback. But she had a point when she said women who work in the fields aren’t fair skinned.” Midnight’s Children saw Shriya wear darker makeup, something they replicated for Manam .
Films like these were eye openers: “For the longest time I was trying to please others. I can blame the whole world for each film that went wrong but if I’m not happy about a project I cannot give my best. Now I choose carefully.”
With all this learning, what made her accept a song appearance in Nakshatram ? “I was selfish to work with KV (Krishnavamsi) sir. I was sceptical though. He narrated the entire story and told me where the song would come; it isn’t an item number.”
Her film roster includes Balakrishna starrer Paisa Vasool , Prakash’s Raj’s directorial in Hindi which is a remake of Ulavacharu Biryani and director Karthick Naren’s Naragasooran (Tamil) produced by Gautam Menon. There’s also a Telugu psychological thriller with debut director Indra where she plays a cop.
A musical?
A career spanning 16 years and 70-odd movies later, Shriya plans to co-write a musical for stage, focusing on dance. If she hadn’t been an actor, she would have been teaching dance. “You see me in these gym clothes but I don’t go there often. I was heavily gymming during Manam and during Gautami… , I practised Kathak everyday. I like the way I look in Gautami… ,” she says, tucking in spinach dosa.
Shriya never thought she would be in films for a long haul. A Lady Shriram College alumnus, she auditioned for a music video at the insistence of her Kathak teacher Shovana Narayan and eventually bagged her first Telugu film. “I was an embarrassment for the team. Vikram (Kumar) told me, ‘you finish this and go back to college; this world is not for you’. I’d sit on the floor and read between shots; I would walk to the shooting spot even if it meant being delayed. I didn’t understand this south Indian fixation with punctuality; I thought there’s no harm in a 10-minute delay.”
Then, things changed. She began taking things seriously and periodically attends acting workshops. One such video featuring her and Ram Charan in a workshop has been circulating online. “That was during the break after Sivaji . I love these workshops where you understand little things, like space utilisation in a scene or voice modulation. I keep my eyes open for workshops, not just for cinema. I want to do an art appreciation workshop,” she signs off.
