September 25th, 2011

Motilal – My Memorable Roles

I have survived three heart attacks, three thromboses of the heart, one of the brain, an air crash, a near drowning—and several rotten films. There have been films and films. The bad ones failed but I never failed as an actor. That’s why I have survived. To each role I have given of my best.

Take my very first film. “The Lure of the City.” I was a greenhorn playing the hero opposite Sabita Devi. Was I dumb on the sets? I was—I really couldn’t talk. I kept “seeing” the camera. They packed up for the day in desperation. Sabita’s mother sensed my discomfiture, sent her daughter to talk to me, to put me at ease. I made it a point to go round the studio, meet and know everyone—I shook a lot of hands—thus putting myself entirely at ease. Then I was all right. Never again did I “see” the camera on any set.

Next, I did a stunt film—”Silver King”. I had to fence. “Can you fence?” asked the director. “No,” I said. “Not with a sword anyway. But with a pen, yes.”

Isn’t the pen mightier than the sword?

Then we fenced some, the director and I using pens!

“Now for the real thing,” the director said. “You can learn fencing. You can do it in a day. It has been done before. We can do it again.”

I hired a Frenchman to teach me fencing. Back on the sets, what did I get to fence with? A hell of a sword weighing over six pounds! I balked. I could hardly lift the thing. “Go on, go on,” urged the director. “Of course you can lift it. We have done it before.”

All I had to do for the scene, I discovered, was to come down a staircase. Yakub, playing the villain, and a number of his “henchmen” were to be in the hall. I had only to flash the sword once and the villains, by cinematic magic, would drop!

For this, all the bother of learning fencing!

For the same film, I was supposed to jump into a river that used to flow somewhere near Andheri and “rescue” a drowning woman. “Is the water deep enough?” I asked. “Yes, yes,” assured the director. “Go on, jump, we’ve done it before, we can….” he hurried me.

I jumped. Almost near the water. I saw it was a very shallow river. What I was heading for was not the “rescue” of the woman but the breaking of my own neck. I did a quick somersault before I hit water and saved myself.

Then I had to grab a chandelier in a palace hall scene—grab it and swing on it to land on a balcony. We landed on the floor—I and the chandelier which, of course, had been insecurely fixed.

That’s how they did things…

How I do things, how I act, is by not acting at all. I just live a role. In “Pardesi” I play a youth who is a victim of amnesia. I got into the role so much I hadn’t recovered my memory for some weeks after the shooting was done. Similarly, for some time after “Arman”, in which I played a blind youth, was completed, I could not see all right.

I was not greedy. I did two or three films a year and was happy. It helped that only good stories from writers like K.M.Munshi were chosen for filming, by companies like Sagar Movietone and New Theatres. But I never fussed about roles. Even if what I got was a brittle role I was confident of breathing life into it. This I do by my own power of improvisation. The power I draw from my study of life around me, of human nature.

Let me illustrate this improvisation. In Gemini’s “Mr. Sampath”, based on R.K. Narayan’s novel. I decided to play Mr. Sampath, with his lack of attachment, his desire merely to live his life as he wanted to, not as an extraordinary person, but precisely as an ordinary person.

Earlier Mr. Vasan, the producer-director, had insisted on showing me two reels of a Tamil film made on the same theme. I thought it was slow—it rather gave me a headache. Then I gave Mr.Vasan a “taste” of how I would prefer to play my role. When the Hindi film was finished and well received, I suggested to Mr. Vasan that we do a sequel, “Mr. Sampath Goes to the U.N.O.” depicting the impact of Mr. Sampath on bungling politicians—and vice versa. Now to come to a role that has more personal implications than the others.

Visualise a man with a semi-bald pate, wire frame spectacles perched precariously on his nose, a tooth-brush moustache. He has an air of ineffable sadness and, inside of him, he is full of goodness to the world—a world which hasn’t been all good to him, in which he finds ultimate dignity only in death.

His name is Motilal, too. I play him in “Chhoti Chhoti Batein”, the film I have laboured much to put together bit by bit.

This is my most recent role but the one I have wanted to do longest. In visualising the Motilal of my film, a suburban philosopher, a man who is silently asking himself: “Where is peace?” and is led on from corner to corner, I have borrowed of myself, of many echoes from all my yesterdays (This interview was conducted in 1963).

Memories