Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Nagesh Kukunoor

In the film that sees most of his Iqbal crew back in action, Nagesh has broken many rules of comedy. “That’s for me the definition of whacky comedy — one in which my characters do many weird things and yet we derive some sense of logic in their acts. I call it creative freedom.” And as for the Iqbal crew, “it wasn’t so much a conscious effort to reunite all of them as to make my next film quickly,” he reveals.

In B2B which is a love story between an Indian boy (Shreyas Talpade) and a Thai girl (Lena Christensen), Nagesh shows the culture clashes between the two. But he clears, “it is comedy plus culture and not the culture clash as is repeated in most films.”

To choose his heroine from Thailand, he conducted “painfully boring” auditions in which most girls either didn’t know English or did not look “Oriental” enough. The process also triggered the idea of love that can happen without the bridge of language.

“Most romance or love is about perfect communication. So I thought why not talk about the love that happens without communication. So in this film, both the boy and the girl don’t talk in each other’s language till the end. It is just the few words and pure emotions that bind the two. That is where exploring the culture of Thailand also came in,” shares Nagesh. Unlike many other filmmakers, he feels that India is a quite a shooting-friendly country, except that there are “lakhs of people watching you.”

Nagesh is known for breaking rules in his films anyway. But “to the point that the producer gets his money back.” He says initially he felt a little lonely in the industry, but now, since he has a “track record” of making good films, many people are coming to him with offers!

With his forthcoming films too, he refuses to play by the rules. In Aashain, he talks about learning to live life ‘now’ and not wait for that moment to come. “It is an emotional film with lots of ‘sweet’ drama.” It stars John Abraham. His Tasveer “is a thriller” — beyond this, he doesn’t want to “burst the bubble” — and Bemisaal is “story based on true life.”

Acting is his passion, direction came by training. “I am a trained actor from Atlanta so I don’t let this training go waste,” says the man who usually takes a small role in his films.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail