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In a chat with Jyothi
Venkatesh, Freida Pinto says that she would like to be a part of new-age Indian cinema
Freida Pinto, who plays a key role in Woody Allen’s latest film You will Meet A Dark Tall Stranger, which is scheduled for release on December 17, is a beauty with brains. "The character of the musicologist Dia that I play in the film is a very troubled character, who does not know what she wants out of life. I was very troubled when I set out to play the character. I did not feel mystified when I played the character with a different bent of mind," Freida tells me at the outset when I interview her at Goa. Freida says that though her director Woody Allen may be as old as her grandfather, he is a young man at heart, who manages to keep his creativity growing constantly. "I was overjoyed when told that Woody Allen selected me for his film three days after I had flown down to give a screen test in New York for the role, when my agent told me that Woody Allen was on the lookout for the right actor to play the character of Dia in his film. Woody Allen was part of my curriculum when I was studying literature at St Xavier’s College in Mumbai. Though a lot of directors have different styles, his style is meant for an actor, since he is also an actor." "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger leaves you with a message that the grass is always greener on the other side. Whether it is good or bad, it’s for you to decide. The film has indeed been a great eye-opening experience. Woody told me to enjoy reading the script and even feel free to change my lines if I did not like them. Though I felt that it was really sweet on his part, considering that I am a newcomer, I felt too scared to change the lines and just adhered to the lines in the script," Freida says. Freida does not feel that Anupam Kher, who has done a small cameo in the film You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger as Freida’s father, has been wasted. "I think Anupam Kher is very happy to have been a part of a legendary maker like Woody Allen’s film. If you walk with a legend, it is an entirely different experience for an actor." I ask Freida whether she had any reservations about doing the intimate lip to lip smooching sequences in the film since the kissing sequences are either long shots or "cheatingly" shot with the camera showing her head over her co-actor’s head. "When you have more than 60 people filming you, everything is professional. I have no objection to doing kissing scenes since I am a professional and it is entirely up to the director to take the call." Slumdog Millionaire was a fabulous experience for her as an actor. "It was very interesting to see the city in which I grew up in my backyard in the film. Frankly none of us, including Danny, thought about what would happen after the release of the film. In fact, the director told me and Dev Patel that we should be prepared to see 50 people coming to the theatre to watch the film when it opens, forgetting to add zeros to the number.’ Freida wants to clear the misconception in the media that she feels that Bollywood is too glamorous for her and does not want to be a part of it. "How can the media equate Bollywood to Indian cinema? Bollywood is a part of Indian cinema. There are other alternative cinemas in India too, like the regional films and the offbeat cinema, the kind of films made by young directors like Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee. Bollywood is a big celebration and it is wrong to state that it looks at women as just dolls. I have loved Bollywood films, like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Omkara, Dev D, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Sholay etc. I am game for a Bollywood role if it is good enough, but I should be satisfied with my role in the film and not regret and ask myself why the hell I did that film" If she likes the script, Freida reiterates that the length or breadth of a`A0role does not really matter, as long as the plot that is narrated remains the same, when the film is made. "I’d love to work in films being made in Bollywood by makers I admire like Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee. Though I can get entertained by Bollywood films, I cannot see myself entertaining people, since I am interested in the new age cinema or what you call the alternate cinema than the mainstream cinema. " Right now, Freida is working in films like Rise of The Apes, which is a prequel to the Planet of Apes, Tarsem Singh’s Immortals and last but not the least, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Black Gold, to be shot in Tunisia, which seeks to tell a tale of rival Arabic rulers during the Arab oil boom of the 1930s and dwells at length about the rise of a young, dynamic leader, who unites the various tribes of the desert kingdoms.
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