Got the cut!
After playing a series of characters with unruly hair and moustache, Chandan Roy Sanyal has finally got a hair cut for his upcoming film Prague . The talented actor, who emerged on the scene with Kaminey , was typecast as the second in command of the main villain. Recently, he repeated himself with flair in D Day. But Chandan doesn’t seem to mind it. “I find it okay because sometimes writers write crazy roles but the directors are unable to find actors to fit in. That they find me capable of portraying such high energy roles is their belief in my talent. And now what you saw me doing for 12 minutes in D Day , you will see me performing for the entire length of the film in Prague !” Hair cut apart, Chandan says it is psychological thriller set in the Czech capital. “It is the story of an architect, who goes to the city for work and suddenly something strange happens with him. It is like we are talking on phone and don’t know what is in store as soon as we hang up.” Industry is finally realising that lean could also be mean. Chandan agrees. “See, Al Pacino is also of almost my height but nobody notices it. Once the camera starts rolling size becomes immaterial. I want to slip on banana and kick my way into the room with conviction.” The day seems not far as Subhash Ghai has cast him as one of the leads in Kaanchi . “I am doing whatever a hero does.”
Playing lonely
Model and theatre actress, Nimrat Kaur, who is playing the lead role of a lonely wife, who develops a relationship with an aged man over letters in Ritesh Batra’s much-acclaimed Lunchbox , says she not only attended workshops but also tried to change her looks for the role. “I stopped threading my eyebrows. I cut my nails and stained them with henna to create a certain look. I wanted to create a housewife, who looks into the mirror only when she brushes her teeth.” She is still so much into the character that she has put the still of her buying vegetables on her Twitter account. “It is a shot that has not been used in film but I liked it because it captures the life of the character very well.” She is not apprehensive of being typecast. “These are different times. If a role is compelling, I can go to any extent.” As to how did she generate loneliness in her mind so that audience could see it on her face, Nimrat says, she tried to create her own reasons for the character.
“Our films might not be interested in them, but we see many such women around us. They keep on trudging even when they know that their partner is not reciprocating. What I was surprised with was how much camera can capture. Sometimes, I would tell Ritesh, Oh! You have taken this angle. I was not expecting this expression.” Somebody, who is not keen to see the video assist after each shot, Nimrat says she considered Ritesh as her video assist. “Also, we shot in such a small apartment that it was practically impossible to reach the video assist through cables and other paraphernalia.” Nimrat puts the film’s originality as one of the reasons for its international acclaim. “As a theatre actor and an avid watcher of world cinema, I could easily notice the influences in the script. Here I found none.”
Time to try velvet
Anurag Kashyap’s ambitious project Bombay Velvet finally got started in Sri Lanka. Like Deepa Mehta’s Midnight Children, Anurag is recreating Bombay in Colombo because the present day Mumbai is not suitable to recreate the period piece while some parts of Colombo still retain that old world feel. Admitting this is his most commercial film, Kashyap said at the press conference, “This is my biggest film ever and when I was leaving for Sri Lanka, it hit me that my nine year dream was becoming real.” The filmmaker, who has also spoken about the film being his most commercial ever, has left no stone unturned to make sure Bombay Velvet turns out to be an epic in its scale and magnitude. Scheduled for a December 2014 release, the film stars Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, Kay Kay Menon and Karan Johar.
For her
For long, film industry treated women as entities, who are meant to be only in front of the camera but perceptions are changing and changing fast In 2012 women from all across the nation won the National Award in films for fields as diverse as costume design, voice narration, editing, and dialogues. Now, WIFT, a not-for-profit organisation that encourages and supports women in film and television, and Films Division has come together to provide the audience an opportunity to watch these films and also an opportunity to meet the National Award winning filmmakers as they attend the screening. Called The Red Dot Film Festival, the films are being screened in Mumbai till this Sunday.
