Abhishek Bachchan asked me if he should eat more to look bigger for I Want To Talk role: Shoojit Sircar

The protagonist of Shoojit Sircar’s latest feature | Want To Talk, Arjun Sen, has just 100 days to live after being diagnosed with laryngeal cancer.

- 

Refusing to accept it as fait accompli, a resilient Arjun, played by Abhishek Bachchan, continues to live and lead a full life as a father and a marketing professional. Sircar, who was drawn to this real-life story for its quirkiness despite being poignant, narrates how he navigates his terminal illness and builds a bond with his daughter, Reya. Sircar talks about how he cast Abhishek as the lead, worked on his physicality and what he learnt from his theatre days. :The film is based on the story of my friend Arjun Sen, who has been working in the US for the last 35 years, and his daughter. We started talking about his life in 2020, over Zoom. | found something fascinating about him but | did not know that | was going to make a film about him. These conversations went on till 2021. Then something clicked in my mind and | bounced it off with writer Ritesh Shah. | told Ritesh there was something bizarre and hilarious about him; he was suffering for long and yet could laugh at himself as he went through life-and-death situations. In 2022, we decided to work on a script.That was my motive. | wanted to document his life as well as my understanding of life and death. This was also an exploration of a father-daughter relationship. Somewhere we all — Abhishek, Ritesh and | — connected to the story as fathers. | wanted the audience to relate to what they are going through in their own lives. Arjun’s story made me think about my relationship with my daughter.You can say that Abhishek manipulated me. We were in Melbourne and he took me out for dinner. We were wi