Acting Is Self-Indulgent, It's No Way For A Grown-Up To Earn A Living

Not your typical film industry veteran, it’s hard to catch Naseeruddin Shah in a conversational mood when it comes to interviews. Thankfully, some ‘right questions’ click with the actor par excellence. Here, Shah, who was last seen in the recently released Hope Aur Hum, talks to Prachi Pinglay-Plumber about the pretensions in erstwhile parallel cinema, what attracts him to some roles and not others, what he enjoys about present day movies and his unending love for Ismat Chugtai’s work, which he has staged time and again. Excerpts:

What draws to you a particular script or a story, especially when you are working with new directors, a new team?

It’s hard to say. I get drawn to different things at different times. I think it’s the heart in a script that really draws me in. A lot of scripts are written with an eye on what will be popular or what will titillate or what this actor can do well. I don’t think those kinds of scripts ever work. The ones I have done, the ones that have resonated with people, were scripts which were written from the heart, out of a genuine need to tell those stories. Whether you talk of an Aakrosh (1980), a Manthan (1976) or a Masoom (1983), these are the films that succeed. If I sense that the idea matters to the writer in a script, it immediately grabs me. If the writer is just trying to be clever, you can sense that too.

Do you see any similarities between the present alt-cinema movement and parallel cinema of the 70s and 80s? How are/were they different from commercial films?

I find this distinction bad. There are good films and bad films. There are films which are made in Rs 3.5 lakh and are very successful, like Chakra (1981) or Aakrosh. And there are films made in Rs 300 crore which are awful. Every film is a commercial film in my definition because it costs so much to make one. You can’t make a film for your personal satisfaction. That is why I detest the cinema of people like Mani Kaul. Firstly, it gives good cinema a bad name. Everyone equates good cinema with boring shots and boring films— where a character takes 10 minutes to walk down a corridor and still nothing happens at the end of the shot. Those films tried to be cool and fashionable by dispensing with drama, which in my opinion is absolute non-sense. You can’t dispense with drama in cinema. As Hitchcock said, cinema is real life without the dull parts.