# 2 - LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACT.

21st February 2005

One of Karan Johar's favourite rapid-fire questions is about overrated actors. His guests give him varied answers, some candid, some not, but none, surprisingly, ever question the validity of the question. From where I see it, there are no overrated actors. Only incompetent directors.

Cinema is the director's medium. Everyone else, on the set, away from it, only sees the film in parts. The entire drama is being edited, processed, and understood, only in the director's head. He is the
connecting element between all the entities (and there are a good many) that eventually make a film. And actors, though the most visible, are quite frankly, perhaps the smallest part of that process.

Good actors can get typecast in good roles. Reflecting the ethos of the same society, the same social pressures, the craft begins to blur when faced with great scripts showing Gangster sagas, earnest cops and the hope-laden tragedies over and over again. The audience that goes to watch them enjoys the predictability, then after a couple of films, finds the familiarity of their acting good, then okay, then so what and then leaves them mildly contemptuous. Nana Patekar, Sunny Deol, Déjà vu.

But a smart director can change the equations ever so smartly, gambling, taking risks with his casting. Abhishek in Yuva was a great casting decision (though Jr. did turn the role into a caricature). The role could have been given to Manoj Bajpai or Ajay Devgan's role given to Irfan Khan but the director decided to create an imbalance in the minds of cine goers with a cast that didn't quite fit in. The focus of the audience then shifts from watching great actors do their stuff to normal actors do…what…they don't quite know. From thereon everything is a surprise.

There are many such subtle and not so subtle shifts in balance that have been attempted in Hindi films over the years. Such as Sadhana in Who Kaun Thi and Mera Saaya, Dharmender in Satyakaam and Sunil Dutt in Mujhe Jeene Do. The most recent ones include Urmila in Rangeela and Sathya, Amitabh as the underdog cop in Khakhi, Kareena in Chameli and Saif in Dil Chahta Hai. Urmila shed her sweet image to turn sexy, then shifted from that to plain Jane, Kareena went from rich spoilt girl to a bad mouthing prostitute and
Saif turned from maybe gay Casanova to the charming bumbling sweet guy next door. A smart director would give Saif a more serious part next time. Anyone who watched the effect his role had on 'Ek Hasina Thi' would agree.

It's not just the actors who need to keep themselves fresh, it is also the directors, who, when faced with a handful of saleable faces, need to make the right switches to get the best out of their script. On rare occasions, actors switch roles and attempt to place themselves in the director's shoes, but most are content to just rehearse their lines, pucker their foreheads and wait for the director to say 'Action'.