Amrita Rao and Shreyas Talpade in
Welcome to Sajjanpur |
Shreyas
Talpade is on seventh heaven because his latest release —
Shyam Benegal’s Welcome to Sajjanpur — has clicked in
a big way at the box office. "There are so many reasons I
chose this film, the main and the most important one was that
the film had Shyambabu as the director. I was overwhelmed when I
got this offer. The second reason was because I got an
opportunity to work with Shyambabu at such an early stage in my
career".
Welcome to
Sajjanpur is Shyam
Benegal’s first attempt at making a comedy film. What do you
have to say about his comic sense?
"I think
he is brilliant at it. When I met Shyambabu, I thought he must
be a no nonsense guy. But when I saw him directing, I realised I
was wrong. He is very chilled out and young at heart and
constantly cracked one-liners with a straight face and made us
all laugh. His comic timing has come out very well in the film.
We all actually felt like we were on a picnic".
Talking about
his role in the film, Shreyas says, "I play Mahadev, the
protagonist in the film. That itself was one reason that excited
me when I got the offer. But apart from that the character was
very interesting, I play a letter writer in the film, the only
educated person in the entire village. It is about how different
people come to him and make him write even their personal
letters and make him their confidante. With this power, he
sometimes even manipulates their words according to his own
interest".
Shreyas shyly
admits that he still writes letters sometimes, but that’s only
to his wife Deepti, who is a psychologist. "It need not be
on special occasions like a birthday or some thing, but whenever
I feel I can write and express myself better, I write it to her.
I do answer my fan mails myself, though people think we hire
people to answer our mails but it’s not true at least with
me".
Shreyas admits
that to some extent, he does relate himself to the character
Mahadev in the film, because he believes that whatever role he
sets out to play, he somewhere has the shades of the character
he is playing. The entire film was shot at Ramoji studios in
Hyderabad, which was converted into a small village called
Sajjanpur. The entire shoot was completed in just 30 days and it
was a smooth sailing journey.
When asked
being a Maharashtrian, didn’t he find it difficult to speak
Bhojpuri, he said, "It is a different language than Hindi
but it is not Bhojpuri, it is called Beghelkhandi. It was not
really difficult for me to speak in that dialect because since
in my college days, I was interested in learning different
languages and loved to play with different dialects and hence
didn’t find it different to adjust to this language. But since
it was new for all of us, we learned the language before
delivering the dialogues. We had a dialogue coach on the sets to
help us if we got stuck with our dialogues". The toughest
scene in the film that he found really difficult to shoot as an
actor was a scene in the film between Amrita and him where he
had to display two different emotions back to back. "I was
supposed to start the scene in a happy mood and then suddenly
get in to the emotional mode. Usually when I know what emotion I
am required to play while shooting, I prepare myself beforehand
for the same but here, to emote two drastically different
emotions one after another was bit difficult for me". —
MF
|
