‘I Want To Talk’, directed by Shoojit Sircar and produced by Ronnie Lahiri and Sheel Kumar, released this week with a promise of an unforgettable journey of life and the choice of how we choose to live it. In the lead up to it, actor Abhishek Bachchan joined his director “dada” for a chat to give audiences a glimpse into his character Arjun and the film’s central theme of self-discovery.
Here are some excerpts from their free-wheeling conversation…
Shoojit Sircar (SS): Let's quickly go straight to the film and see what exactly moved you to really work on this film and you got an inspiration that I know I should act in this film. Not just as a Shoojit Sircar film, but I'm talking about the story.
Abhishek Bachchan (AB): Dada, what I think it's very important as an actor is to find some sort of an anchor in the story. And that anchor, what I've learnt over time, has to be an emotional anchor. It's like a lynchpin basis that the rest of the garnishing and the cosmetics of the screenplay come into it. For me, when you just told me about the motivation of Arjun Da, that was the one hook that really got me.
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SS: Like, to take it from there, when the first time I heard that Arjun Da has got, which the character that you're playing has got, the doctors have given him 100 days to live. I mean that doctor gave him 12 or 15 years back and I got hooked that somebody got 100 days to live. And what will he do? So that got me, you know, my curiosity too.
AB: No, it's an amazing thought. If you think that a doctor tells you, you have 100 days. What does a person think? First, how do you process that information?... There'll be financial things, there'll be emotional things, there'll be personal things. There's a whole checklist that you start making.
And for a person to be going through that, was so intriguing to me because it sounds very cool. You have 100 days to live, why are you making a picture on it? But what does a person actually do when you sit down and just give it five minutes and think, it's an amazing frame of mind to be in.
SS: ‘I Want to Talk’ is a kind of film for me that you know that communication is very important. Lot of my friends told me you know, I could not talk to my father, I could not talk to my mother. I wish I’d spoken everything that is there in my heart. So, all this impacted me and I made this film. I really want the audience to watch this film.
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AB: It's a very inspirational film. What I liked about your approach is that it's a change of flavour and I say that because currently the environment we're in, everything is larger than life, everything is on steroids, everything is loud. I love that high octane, melodrama. I think it's so important that in the middle of this is to have a punctuation mark. And the punctuation mark is to sit down, take a deep breath, settle into a nice slice of life film that might not make you think. To be able to pull that off successfully is an amazing feat.
You judge it, you feel the way you want to feel. It's a very personal experience.