Breaking the cast system

From malls to mobile repair shops, casting directors in Bollywood are picking up talent anywhere they find it

June 17, 2017 06:30 pm | Updated June 19, 2017 06:27 pm IST

Marching up an iron stairway to MacGuffin Pictures’ first floor office we are greeted with a note on the main door: ‘Dear All. This is not a casting office. Neither any audition happens here. Please do not disturb.’ Despite this curt missive, starry-eyed strugglers have continued to bother Honey Trehan, one of Bollywood’s popular casting directors, who also runs production company MacGuffin with filmmaker Abhishek Chaubey.

Not just for wannabe actors desperate to put one foot in the door but also for the media, Bollywood’s casting process has been interesting for a while now—not for its proverbial ‘couch’ but for how a new and improved system has begun to evolve. This has not just given talented young actors a leg up, but has professionalised an industry notoriously reluctant to do so.

So here I am, in Versova’s Aram Nagar, Mumbai’s perennially restless and bustling film, television and advertising hub. How is the new brigade of casting directors bending the rules of mainstream Hindi cinema to train the spotlight on the centrality of their work? And how are they pushing the envelope? When Trehan was casting for his house production, Konkona Sen Sharma’s directorial debut A Death in the Gunj , he used the new idiom of casting to its hilt.

“On the one hand, we wanted to create a familiar world for the audience, a world of recognisable faces with Ranvir Shorey as the bully Vikram, with a veteran like Tanuja coming together with Om Puri for the first time on screen. On the other hand, the hero, Shutu, had to be unfamiliar and unidentifiable,” he says. So they went for an inscrutable Vikrant Massey—the perfect loner on the margins, the non-conformist who wouldn’t fit in. The result turned out to be fabulously good.

Life after Chak De!

It’s a strategy quite the opposite of what Trehan had earlier employed for Kaminey . There the central characters—Guddu/ Charlie and Sweety—were played by well-known stars Shahid Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra while the world around them was peopled with relatively unknown names.

He did this in Udta Punjab too, with several nameless faces surrounding the Shahid Kapoor-Alia Bhatt-Kareena Kapoor-Daljit Dosanjh quadrangle to bring alive a rough and rustic, drug-riddled Punjab. “The world around the leads had to be believable, rooted and lived-in to, in turn, bring the spotlight on them,” he explains.

Trehan is proud of the 1942 he helped create in Dibakar Banerjee’s Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! or the 1947 he is going to bring alive in Nandita Das’s forthcoming Manto . The characters he picks create the world on the screen, rooted in their times and the milieu, as much as the props, the sets, and locations. Trehan, with his background in theatre (training under stalwarts like Piyush Mishra and Barry John), became a casting director by default while assisting filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj. Delhi Belly , Fukrey , Raees , his list of films is impressive. He even cast for A.R. Murugadoss’s Tamil film Thuppakki .

Things weren’t this evolved or regularised when he started his career. Producers and directors were concerned only with casting leads; the smaller roles were filled up at the last minute. “There was no example to follow, any struggler on the lookout for a break was given a small role,” he recalls. In fact, the first casting credit he remembers seeing was filmmaker Tigmanshu Dhulia’s for Bandit Queen .

“Casting,” says Nandini Shrikent, “came into its own after Chak De! India .” We are sitting in her serene Bandra home far from the bustle of Aram Nagar. For Shrikent, personally, casting came alive with Rock On!! It was followed by a lot of significant work in the shape of Life of Pi , Little Zizou , Reluctant Fundamentalist , Tasher Desh , and Student of the Year . From the days of being just another chore assigned to one of the assistant directors, casting has indeed come a long way, she says.

700 hopefuls a day

“It is taken seriously now. It’s not something that needs to be explained to people any more. It does not need to be spelt out,” agrees Abhimanyu Ray, whose work in Chak De! India and Rocket Singh: Salesman of The Year is held to have heralded Bollywood’s right-casting trend.

Ray remembers how he “dedicated his life” to Chak De , testing 1,000 girls for the 11 roles. “You don’t get scripts like that every day!” Band Baaja Baaraat was the last film he did, after which he moved to casting for ads—he’s done the Airtel ads and the latest Vicks commercial. He wanted time to play music, paint, cook, but most of all to focus on writing and, eventually, directing his own film.

Whether in films or ads, casting directors are finally being acknowledged as specialists in their field, making good money, getting due credit and sometimes getting as busy as the stars, if not more. Like Shanoo Sharma, now casting director at Yashraj Films. Her appointment diary is booked weeks ahead. She is the name that has launched hundreds of contemporary stars—from Ranveer Singh to Parineeti Chopra.

Then you have Tess Joseph, who has worked on international projects such as The Namesake , The Darjeeling Limited , The Waiting City , Fair Game , West is West , Life of Pi , SOLD and, most recently, Lion .

A short walk from MacGuffin is the office of one of Trehan’s former associates, Mukesh Chhabra. A queue of fledgling actors snakes outside. Mukesh Chhabra Casting Company claims to be the “first professional, independent casting company in the industry”. A Delhi theatre guy, Chhabra started off small with films like Amal and Chintuji . Now, having worked on films as diverse as Gangs of Wasseypur , Masaan , Bajrangi Bhaijaan and PK , he boasts of an office wall full of good luck messages signed by superstars. He has a team of 70 people, and separate departments to handle TV, ads, web series and films.

The ‘right’ face

On the first floor of his office are exclusive spaces for video introductions and auditions. In the queue, the hopefuls clutch thick folders. “About 700 people walk in every day,” Chhabra says. Doesn’t it irritate him? “We survive because of the strugglers, not the stars. They help in the growth of the industry and Bollywood is beginning to understand their value. One Gangs… gave so much fresh talent to the industry.”

An autorickshaw ride away, in a small studio in Andheri’s Lakshmi Industrial Estate, one such actor used to once be Chhabra’s former assistant. Today, Aakash Dahiya is busy conducting auditions for the role of Sukhdev for upcoming TV serial Azad . He sounds exasperated at not yet having hit upon the “right” 15-year-old to play the young Chandrasekhar Azad.

Casting came to Dahiya through acting and acting through casting. He bagged a role in Chillar Party while giving cues to another actor during auditions. In D-Day , he was the lanky, awkward mole on a mission in Pakistan. Today, he runs Casting Ring, with fellow actors Pawan Singh, Rajesh Maurya and Varun Panwar, but plans to continue acting too.

Most casting directors have bigger ambitions. “I came here to become a filmmaker,” says Ray. Like him, Atul Mongia, actor, scriptwriter, aspiring filmmaker, did path-breaking work in Love Sex Aur Dhokha but texts me to say he isn’t in the game any longer. Trehan too is busy with his debut directorial venture, starring Deepika Padukone and Irrfan Khan, and written by his mentor Bhardwaj.

Beyond the star cast

Yet, Trehan obviously loves every minute of casting.. “For performing a moment, you need an actor but for living a moment, you need a human being,” says Trehan. And they seem to pull them out of the oddest places. Chhabra found Munni in Bajrangi Bhaijaan in a Gurgaon mall and the young Geeta Phogat for Dangal in Kashmir. He cast Baljinder Kaur as the ammi in Shahid 10 years after first meeting her in a Hissar school. The drug dealer Tashi in Kaminey is Tenzing Nima, a tour operator in Mussoorie. The drug-addict teenaged sardar Balli in Udta Punjab came from a mobile repair shop in Sion, and was one among 300 shortlisted.

It would seem that Bollywood has gradually learnt the value of right-casting. It is more willing to look beyond the stars, it is getting gutsy about new faces. There is greater stress on getting the right texture and tone for a film, with background characters and walk-ons becoming as significant as the ‘hero-heroine’. As Shrikent says, “They can make or break a scene.”

To the extent that, these days, some films may take longer to cast than shoot. Dangal and Gangs…, with its 384 characters, took a year to cast, PK took nine months and Rajkumar Hirani’s forthcoming Sanjay Dutt biopic has taken 18 months.

Partnerships seem to work. “You have to work according to the director’s vision,” says Dahiya. So you have Jogi Malang teaming with Shoojit Sarcar— Vicky Donor , Madras Café , Piku , Pink . Priyadarshan sends Trehan a list of characters with two-line descriptions and a free hand to finalise the cast. But the hands-on Dibakar Banerjee will talk or Skype for hours every day to zoom in on the perfect Satyawati for Byomkesh . He is the kind who keeps looking for better even when the best is on hand.

Like the legendary Majid Majidi, with whom Trehan worked for the forthcoming Beyond the Clouds . “He casts keeping the human emotions of his script in mind,” says Trehan.

The best casting is unobtrusive, so good it is not noticeable. And there aren’t any schools to teach you, nor awards. (Chhabra has won a couple of special recognition trophies; Lynn Stalmaster received an honorary Oscar.)

But with casting, as with detergent, Indians want “achcha par sasta”, as Dahiya says, and the industry is unwilling to pay what good actors deserve. Also, established actors are still wary of trying out-of-the-box roles; in fact, they don’t really value auditioning.

For Ray, Bollywood still has a long way to go; the focus is still too much on the star. “It is still about going to Chandigarh to find a soni kudi . At some point you begin to feel like a bounty hunter,” he says.

Casting is so much more, he says. “It’s about understanding characters and script, about discussing the part and its graph, and helping actors build what is required for the film.” Before the director takes over and calls action.

namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in

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