His eyes had it. They could look inside the viewer and touch the chord that he wanted to. Over the years, Irrfan Khan proved his biggest asset were his eyes. They spoke more than the dialogue. In fact, in Haasil arguably his first film, where he played a villain with good heart, there is a dialogue where he tells the hero that love is a game of intentions and eyes, otherwise, his heart is also clean. Many a time, he didn’t need a dialogue, his gaze was enough. In Rog, he used them to generate pain, in Maqbool and Pan Singh Tomar they evoked menace and vulnerability in equal measure and then there were films such as Dil Kabaddi where they could indulge in easy banter.
Never interested in giving gyaan in interviews, Irrfan was a wonderful listener. He would discuss cinema, his work, and the world around. Even about his habit of rolling his own cigarettes. “Do you know a way I could leave this habit,” he once asked this journalist in the midst of an intense interview. You compliment him, and he would retort, “Achcha! Really. Was I good?”
Impressed by both Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan's style of acting, he once told this journalist that acting was a sensitive process that every actor had to discover on his/her own. “My whole idea of becoming an actor was to experience something that I haven’t. To become somebody else, otherwise, I am boring,” he said. “No teaching school could teach acting. They only tell about emotional memory...once in the National School of Drama I was asked to share an emotional incident from my life. I remembered about my father’s death and I started crying but my immediate concern was one day this would stop working for me. It continued to boggle me.”
Years later it happened during the climax of Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. In the climax his character gets very emotional about the tiger. “I had performed it well but six months later Lee called me to reshoot it. I was blank. I didn’t know how to summon those emotions again. I was not supposed to use any external material to bring tears. I still don’t know how I performed. Perhaps, one has to bring oneself up to the level of challenge and deliver,” he had said.
He had this knack of understanding the peculiarities of the character and demystify it for the audience. Like when he was preparing for Saat Khoon Maaf, he said poets use attractive words but do they need to be physically attractive as well. “I want to bring out this dichotomy.” Well-read about the growth of Natya (drama) in India, he would often say that Indian cinema could not completely move away from its roots of Parsi theatre. “Acting should be subtle but effective. When I act, I make sure that people realise that I am acting. Too much realism passes off as non-acting here.”
He had made a name for himself in Hollywood, but he never left the Indian shores. He wanted to go beyond the “intense” label that the media created for him. “ Jungle main more naacha, kisne dekha . I am comfortable working with both Mira Nair as well as Anees Baazmi. There cannot be one dimension to entertainment,” he would say. Years later, when box office smiled on him with Hindi Medium , he felt he had reached out to people in their cinematic language.
Director Anup Singh who gave Irrfan two of his toughest roles in Qissa and The Song of Scorpions felt Irrfan had the rare ability of imbuing characters with individual nuances rather than going for generic traits. That’s why he could play a Bengali ( Namesake ) as well as a Punjabi ( Qissa ). Perhaps, that’s why he was good even in a bad film. “I guess after Dilip Kumar only he had this ability,” said Singh.
Published - April 29, 2020 06:07 pm IST
