Irrfan Khan on finally getting to do the kind of work he had always wanted to, and still being hungry for more
Irrfan Khan
Of Irrfan’s initial movies, one of the best known and most critically-acclaimed is Tigmanshu Dhulia-directed Haasil, which won him the Filmfare award for Best Actor in a Negative Role and a series of offers for more roles of the same kind. The actor muses, “Haasil was a movie ahead of its time. The audience wasn’t ready for it and there weren’t enough multiplexes back then to make it accessible to more kinds of people either. I’ve found that today’s generation, in fact, relates to it much more. If you think about it, multiplexes coming in really brought younger viewers as well as the middle class to theatres. Now I understand that our film was just wrongly timed. And after it, because of the kind of cinema that was being made at the time, everyone wanted me to play the villain in every film they offered me. As a consequence, my journey as an actor didn’t start out the way I would have wanted it to and the waiting period for me to be able to finally sink my teeth into the kind of work I wanted to do was a very long one.” Once his time did come, there has been no looking back for him.
Were there, however, any instances of characters that he would have dearly loved to play having passed him by while he was waiting? “At some point in the past, I was likely to be wishful about the characters I wasn’t able to play and would have liked to. Today, owing to how my journey has eventually turned out, I believe in the magic of life a little more than I did before. I believe that life’s design for me is always going to be better than anything I attempt to design for myself,” he affirms.
Bygones should be bygones
The actor shares that there are two things he greatly admires about old Hindi cinema: its music and certain filmmakers like Guru Dutt who created masterpieces that will live on eternally in any cinema buff’s memory. He does not, however, wish for the return or revival of that era or any other, for that matter. “I do miss the music of those films and also miss the way music was once a part of Hindi cinema. It still is, but its incorporation into a film’s narrative is definitely different now. I don’t, however, miss that genre of filmmaking. Things should change with time — forms of expression should keep redefining themselves. I wouldn’t want to repeat the work that was being done 25 years ago. Of course, if the kind of films made by Guru Dutt, Vijay Anand or even K. Asif could be made again, that would be wonderful. And as for music, it is a very important factor in my life and I’m happy with the way it is being used in films these days too. I had a song in Piku, for example, and have one in Jazbaa too. You might not find me lip syncing them, but they’re both songs based on my situation in the films,” he says.
Working with Ash
He notes about his experience of working with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan that while he went in with the image he had always had of her from a distance, what he found to be her in reality was something altogether different. “I honestly felt that the person she is and the image that has been created around her over the years, are two things very strangely at odds with each other. I found that Aishwarya is much simpler than I had anticipated. I think the word I’d use for her would be saral. She’s extremely caring too, of everyone around her,” he reveals.
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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