Rahul Bose speaks with a lot of clarity. He chooses his words carefully. Like the films he acts in or directs. Like the causes he associates himself with.
It is hardly surprising to find Rahul, who played international rugby for India for 12 years, among the list of speakers at the Ekamra Sports Literary Festival at Bhubaneswar in the first week of November. It is a unique – Asia’s a first of its kind in Asia — festival, where sport and literature come together.
“I very much liked this idea,” he says, a little before he is scheduled to share stage with legendary javelin thrower Uwe Hohn from Germany and his Indian trainee Neeraj Chopra. “It is wonderful to see sports persons and people who have created literature about them sharing the same space.”
And if you wonder when you are going to see him on screen next, the man who has put in some splendid performances in films like The Japanese Wife , Mr. and Mrs. Iyer , Anuranan , Kaalpurush , Shaurya , Chameli , English August , Bombay Boys and Dil Dhadakne Do , he says it will be soon.
“My next release is Screwdriver , in which I team up with Rajeev Khandelwal,” says Rahul. “Then there is a huge web series with Netflix, the details of which I cannot disclose now. It will be the biggest thing Netflix would have done in a long time.”
He is also getting ready to don the director’s hat once again. Last year he made his directorial début with Poorna: Courage Has No Limit.
“I have completed writing the script for a Hindi movie, which is being produced by Atul Kasbekar and Tanuj Garg,” he says. “We have already signed a top-line actress. I will be directing an American movie too. I will also be acting in it.”
Acting has taken him to films in different languages —Bengali, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam. Most of his regional films have, however been in Bengali.
“The middle-of-the-road is cinema is doing well in Bengal now,” he says. “It had started with my first film, Anuranan , which brought the crowd – not just the upper-class but the middle and lower as well – to the theatres. That film spawned some 20 directors, who are all making movies for the urban audience.”
He is glad the trend continues in Bengali cinema. “From the 1950’s onwards, Bengali – along with Malayalam – has produced the most progressive cinema in India,” he says. “You could not have said the same about the commercial films of Bengal. So there was a gap for the kind of films made by Hrishikesh Mukherjee. I am glad to see the resurgence of Bengali cinema.”
The same, he feels, cannot be said of Hindi films. “Hindi cinema is face driven,” he says. “If there is no (popular) face, you are not going to sell the film. However good your content is, you need a face to sell it. The face is far more important than the story.”
Looking back at his innings as actor, he says Aparna Sen’s The Japanese Wife , in which he played a school teacher from rural Bengal who marries his Japanese pen friend, is his best work yet. “I travelled a long distance to play Snehmoy Chatterjee,” he says. “And Aparna Sen is one of the few people who have actually directed me. Zoya Akhtar also did that in Dil Dhadakne Do . And I was privileged to work with talented directors like Sudhir Mishra, Santosh Sivan, Buddhadev Dasgupta and Govind Nihlani.”
All the three films he did with Aparna are close to his heart. “It was great sharing the screen space with Konkona Sen Sharma in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer ,” says Rahul. “The role wasn’t difficult for me, for the character was quite like me. The other film we did together, for her mother Aparna, 15 Park Avenue , also turned out well.”
