‘Acting was like a cakewalk’

Not many know that Gitanjali Rao’s turn as Professor Vidya Iyer in the recently released October wasn’t the first time that director Shoojit Sircar had directed the animation filmmaker. The last time was around 18 years ago, when Sircar had seen Rao act in a Makrand Deshpande play, post which he cast her in an Asian Paints ad film. Many years later Sircar got in touch again. Rao shares, “Shoojit called me for some advice because he was directing an animation film. He was looking for an animation director. [An] animation director is different from being a director of an animated film. The director need not know animation.” He insisted on her acting in October. Rao was apprehensive as her own production was about to begin but eventually Sircar coaxed her into it. It’s a decision that has paid off beautifully. Rao’s performance as a single mother struggling to cope with her daughter’s comatose situation has won singular praise from all quarters.

She says, “Amazingly, Shoojit did not ask me for an audition. I kept thinking one day he will ask me for an audition and hopefully I will flunk and I wouldn’t have to say no.” But that never happened. It was taken for granted that Rao will be playing Professor Vidya Iyer on screen. Rao was skeptical as she had never acted in a feature film before but Sircar had full faith in her.

Acting once more

Once the shoot began, however it was a different story. “It was the easiest thing I have ever done in my life,” says Rao. Acting in a live-action feature film was a cakewalk as compared to animation films. She noticed that acting was still part of her, “I did it in those formative years – when I was 18-19, you’re like a sponge, you absorb so much. It just came back to me like I had done theatre yesterday. There was no concept of glycerine in theatre. You have to work up the tears. We used to have many exercises where you have to recall some incident of your life, whether it’s anger [or] grief [while saying] your lines,” shares the actor.

While her career has solidified into being an award-winning animation film director, theatre was very much a part of Rao’s life in the early 90s. It was while studying Fine Arts at Sir J. J. Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai, that theatre was a regular affair under the guidance of doyen, Satyadev Dubey. Since she was more inclined towards direction, eventually acting took a backseat. “I learnt the discipline of acting through Satyadev Dubey. He [was a] very rigorous teacher,” continues Rao. “Over the years, I realised, I use a lot of acting in my animation. If you see my films, they are silent, most of them, but the expressions always speak volumes.”

Creative collaborations

Busy with the post-production of her feature-length animation film, Bombay Rose, Rao is still unaware of the numerous praises being showered by critics for her sensitive yet powerful portrayal in October. “I am missing out on the action because I am stuck here full-time,” she says. For Rao, acting allowed her to observe the process of another director up close. “To understand mainstream [cinema], which can also be very artistic [there] are very few directors… He [Sircar] is one of them. Understanding it from watching his filmmaking, makes him more interesting for me. I couldn’t have looked at another director’s work so carefully. Two filmmakers rarely collaborate,” she states.

According to Rao, Sircar’s process is extremely collaborative. “He works with the actors and moulds the character around them, which is not something I would do at all. Or most control freak directors would do.” At one point, Rao wasn’t convinced that her character, a professor who teaches at IIT Delhi and had lived there for around 20 years, despite being a Tamillian, would get the genders wrong while speaking Hindi, as opposed to her brother-in-law from Trichi. The film’s writer, Juhi Chaturvedi agreed with her and asked Rao to go with her conviction.

She admires Sircar’s shooting process. For one of October’s pivotal scenes, we don’t see either actor’s faces – we see Rao looking out of the hospital window while Varun Dhawan is barely visible at the door. “That [shot] has been very beautifully edited. There was a shot of Dhawan completely breaking down, after hearing this, turning away and going.” That shot was edited out in the final film, “Which is the beauty of a Shoojit Sircar film – he can get amazing performances but what he finally puts into the film [makes it]. I am a director, I look at the craft much more than my own acting,” she shares.

Rao recalls another scene, where Dhawan’s mother meets her character for the first time. “He made me meet the mother just 15 minutes before we entered the shot. He keeps at you – that freshness of two people just getting to know each other, not becoming familiar, so it worked like magic.” She says, “When you are a director, you are taking the risks for everything. Here, the amazing part is he is taking the risk with you.”

Passion projects

Acting is not something Rao wants to pursue in the long-term, although, she is open to interesting projects. She recalls Anurag Kashyap jokingly asking her to act in films to make enough money so that she can start producing her own animation films. “I will happily do it when it is interesting, when I have the time, when I like the directors… but after Bombay Rose is finished. It’s like this is my husband and that [October] was my extramarital affair. Now I have to have the baby with the husband, then I can start having extramarital affairs again,” she chuckles. Needless to say, while working on October, Rao didn’t abandon Bombay Rose. She would work remotely from New Delhi, late into the night on her laptop making changes to the sketches. As a result, Rao’s sleep deprived look off-camera turned out to be a perfect add-on to her role in October.

Bombay Rose is an animated film painted frame-by-frame, telling the story of love through a red rose. At present, the film is halfway through production. “It is really the animation production which is the biggest part. There is no editing after, you have to plan everything and then put (things) together. It’s like designing a building and then laying the bricks. You cannot do it faster than a certain [duration as] things have to dry. After that it’s just manual labour. Manual labour for 18 months – but very artistic manual labour,” emphasises Rao.