The first thing Anupam Kher asks me, entering the room where I have been waiting, is, “What are we talking about?” It throws me off a bit and I mumble the first thing that comes to mind, “Maybe five memorable performances.” Pat comes his reply, “Then let’s call this off. It will be so boring. I think I am yet to deliver five performances that I would like to talk about.”

Well, coming from someone who has given us at least two of the most memorable characters in Indian cinema — B.V. Pradhan (Saaransh) and Dr Dang (Karma) — apart from a host of others, that’s a stunning statement.

We decide we will keep it a free-flowing conversation on his craft. We begin talking about his films, touching upon some of his lesser-known ones, like The Boy with the Top Knot, which got him a BAFTA nomination, till he latches on to the drift of the conversation at one point, laughs, and carries on gamely.

Forty years after Saaransh, and over 500 films later, what is it about acting that still excites Anupam Kher?

Anupam Kher: This is a profession where there is no syllabus. In every other profession you reach a certain point and then you say, okay now, it’s time to hang up your boots. When it comes to acting, there is no retirement. If your body and mind are agile, you are learning new things every day. I am most excited about acting now because it comes with the understanding of life. We portray characters and the more we understand human nature, the more you can think of a different way of portraying the same emotion. Everybody that I meet is a character to portray. Including you. The way you wait for me, the way I’m 10 minutes late, the way you deal with it, what goes on in your mind as you sit here. As a person, that’s my nature. I am a people-oriented person. So I don’t count years; I count people I know. My richness depends on how many people I know as a person.

You mention that with life comes an understanding of characters and emotions. And yet you began with a character that had a profound understanding of life.

Anupam Kher: At that time I did it on instinct. I always tell people, my reference point was… that’s the beauty of coming from a background of being an educated actor, a drama school student, theatre background, writers, Russian literature, French Revolution, Arthur Miller, American playwrights, you read so much. That gives you a richness. That gives you information. Knowledge comes with living life.

Since it was my first film, I put whatever frustrations, heartbreaks I had till the age of 27 into it. It was not necessarily a man who had lost his son in America. It was Anupam Kher using his emotional memory of having slept on the railway platform, of humiliation on the streets of Mumbai, going through tough times, and the thought at the back of my mind that if this film does not work, it’s over for me. So I used those emotional memories and incorporated them in B.V. Pradhan.

That’s why when I see Saaransh today, I find it impossible to believe that it’s me. I genuinely do not think that it’s me because I feel, my God, how did I go through this unbelievable amount of emotion at the age of 28?

Any way you would have approached the character differently today?

Anupam Kher: I will use craft, which will be a disaster… the purity of emotions will never be the same… it’s like the law of diminishing marginal utility. Every single shot in the film was done with absolute feelings and emotions. The only other film that I have done with the same sincerity is The Kashmir Files. In everything else, some craft has come, thoughts like, ‘maybe this posture will look nice’. Of course there was craft in Saaransh too. But I banked primarily on pure emotion. Now I am 540-films-old. Some craft is bound to come in.

Coming to this institute called An Actor Prepares, how does Anupam Kher prepare as an actor? How does a Karma call for a different kind of preparation than a Saaransh or Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Maara?

Anupam Kher: Having gone through the various techniques of acting which were taught at drama school, whether it is Stanislavski’s method acting, Bertolt Brecht’s alienation theory, or Jerzy Grotowski’s getting physical about the thing… what I have discovered is that you may use any technique, at the end it is the audience that needs to be convinced. So I try to visualise the person when I read the script. Now we get scripts, earlier 90 percent of the time we were given a narration. And even in narration, I used to see the person. Always. ‘Sir, there is a man who is going on the road and he is carrying an umbrella. He is around 66 years old. And he coughs a little.’ So I will see the person. For me, the physical transformation of that person is important. Once I see the person, I will know how he emotes.

How do you approach a character like Dr Dang…

Anupam Kher: That was all the creation of Mr Subhash Ghai. The whole credit for the performance goes to Mr Ghai, because Dr Dang is not great acting. Mr Ghai needed to put up someone showy and larger-than-life against these four people, Dilip Sa’ab (Kumar), Naseeruddin Shah, Anil Kapoor and Jackie Shroff, who are fighting this terrorist. I had to just look sophisticated and put my glasses up and sort of talk in a very refined manner. The director visualised the helicopter entry… the way the gates open, etc. He created the character brilliantly. But, of course, not anybody could have carried it off. And the menace was in the surroundings. That was Subhashji’s ingenuity… he had seen Gabbar, he wanted a new character who was equally menacing, equally dangerous, but sophisticated.

Now I think how innocent those days were… you could make out from 5km that there is an international terrorist coming. Can you imagine? A whole battalion is waiting, the jailor is waiting, the Indian police are waiting for the terrorist to arrive. It is Mr Ghai who actually convinced the audience that this was possible. I just followed instructions.

In contrast, is a performance like Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Maara or, say, The Boy with the Top Knot....

Anupam Kher: Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Maara was a very difficult role for me. I was producing the film and I did not want to confuse Alzheimer’s with Parkinson’s. I saw a lot of actors doing that. They thought shaking their head and shaking hands were all that there is to it. I wanted to do a little deeper study of Alzheimer’s.

I discovered that patients suffering from Alzheimer’s have vacant eyes. There is no expression, not even an expression that he or she has forgotten something. I am a very expressive person in real life and as an actor. For me to have that vacant expression was difficult. I started trying to work out ways to get into the character, but I did not want to use the physicality of it. I wanted to internalise. This was one of the few times that I internalised a character. I used to go to the beach early in the morning and think, ‘I don’t know who I am.’ But somebody would say namaste to me and I would answer, and I knew that I was one of them. I met people who had gone through Alzheimer’s. I read a lot. That was a mistake. I shouldn’t have.

Why was it a mistake?

Anupam Kher: Because now every time I forget, I think, oh, that is written in that book. And it’s human nature to forget. When a computer is full of information, stuff needs to be deleted to make space. The human mind makes it difficult to delete. You just file away.

So, one day, when there was only about a week left to start shooting, I just wanted one flash of what it means to not know anything. At that time I did not know how to swim. I made up my mind to get up at five o’clock, go to the beach and walk into the water. Try and forget who I am. Drown. So I started walking into the water and I think it happened in a flash, for maybe half a second I forgot who I was. I don’t know how it is possible chemically or physically… but it did. I threw up immediately. That expression, that flash of blankness, got registered in my mind. That’s how I could capture the vacant look.

What were director Jahnu Barua’s inputs?

Anupam Kher: Mr Barua had come up with a different story. It was a very ‘regional’ film. It was brilliant. The moment he narrated to me… ‘there is a man who has Alzheimer’s and he thinks he has killed Gandhi’... that is all he narrated to me outside a dubbing theatre. And I said, I am doing this film. He asked, ‘producer?’ I said, I will produce the film. He had certain aspects, symbolism, in the story that I felt would break its realism. Symbolism in cinema should be used only when it’s required. I had a chat with him. I said, let’s not do that. Let’s play on Alzheimer’s and on the fact that he has this guilt.

How was it different from The Boy with the Top Knot?

Anupam Kher: I was going through depression at that time… I was in a very depressed state of mind and was consulting a doctor. We were shooting in Birmingham. I had seen the videos of the man on whose life the film was based. I knew he was alive. The director was a young lady, Lynsey Miller. This was her first film. It was a tough time for me. My room was on the eighth floor of the hotel. But I would not sleep there. I’d go and sit in the lobby all night. Because I was afraid that I would open the window to my room and do something. It was that bad. So I needed a crowd around myself.

It was an important film for me as an actor, and I realised its potential. It did get me a BAFTA nomination. But I never thought about Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Maara then because this man had a different point of view, different reason… he did not have dementia or even if it was dementia there was nothing physical or psychological that I could explore. This was just a man sitting there, vegetating.

I had been shooting for Judwaa 2 with David Dhawan for 10 days around that time. You can imagine, shooting for Judwaa 2 on the one hand and doing the reading of The Boy with the Top Knot with very intense British actors and a British director. I didn’t have many lines but in certain films I always ask the director, ‘What is the core of the character?’ In fact, five minutes before my first shot for Saaransh, I had asked (Mahesh) Bhatt sa’ab: ‘If you have to describe B.V. Pradhan in one word, what would it be?’ He said, ‘Compassion.’

That word stayed with me for the rest of my life and I look at life from a compassionate point of view. So I asked Lynsey, ‘So how would you describe this thing?’ She said, ‘Imagine a dry leaf which has fallen on the ground from a tree and it is so fragile that if somebody puts a finger on it, it will disintegrate.’

God, it killed me! I said, wow, what a description! Next day I was shooting with David Dhawan for Judwaa 2. So I called up David and… imagine, all this conversation with Lynsey going on in my mind, fragile, dry leaf… and I said, ‘David, what scene will we do tomorrow?’ His response: ‘Jo tu bol dega woh scene hai, yaar, tu fikar kyun karta hai?’ (Laughs)

What a contrast!

Anupam Kher: That’s how David makes films! That’s why his films are suffused with so much joy. Anyway, here I was, having shot for 10 days with David, and then I land up in this ‘fragile, dry leaf’ kind of situation. Usually, actors want to impress the whole crew in the first shot. I was no exception. The first shot that Lynsey put up had me in the foreground. Behind me was the actor playing my son and Deepti Naval. Lynsey wanted to do the whole shot with the father in the foreground, a big close-up, and they were in the background somewhere out of focus.

I had read that I needed to concentrate on something. So I thought, ‘There is an ant walking on the table, I will look at it and have this vacant expression with something going on in my eyes.’ I felt the moment completely. The shot was cut and Lynsey came to me and said, ‘Can we do one more please?’

I said, ‘Yeah, but why, I felt the whole thing.’

She said, ‘Yes, but one more?’

I did one more take. I again felt my eyes brimming over, but I would not let the tears fall. And again she said, ‘Mr Kher, can we do one more?’

Now I got a little irritated. I asked her, ‘What do you want?’

‘Maybe a little less,’ she responded.

I thought this was her first film, so let me ask a smart question, ‘How many percent less?’

Pat came her reply: ‘Umm… 99 percent.’

I burst out laughing. I said, ‘O my god, Lynsey, I am so sorry.’

She said, ‘I don’t want him to feel so much.’

I will never forget that ‘99 percent’. That’s why, sometimes I feel that some performances where I have put my heart in do not work so much, whereas when I have just done nothing, it works…. It reminds me of an incident Ingrid Bergman wrote about in her autobiography. She was shooting with Gary Cooper. She was this intense actress and she was putting everything into the scene and there was Gary Cooper having beer… he would put the beer can aside and give his shot and leave… Ingrid Bergman thought, ‘What the hell is going on… I have heard so much about this Gary Cooper and look at the way he is not even concentrating’…. She went up to Gary Cooper and said, ‘Mr Cooper, you were drinking beer and laughing and then you were giving a shot. How do you manage to do it?’ And he responded, ‘Darling, in acting it’s only 10 per cent actually performing, 90 per cent you have to just be.’

It was such a huge learning. That’s why I think The Boy with the Top Knot worked. I am glad that Lynsey gave me the feedback with my first shot itself.

You have worked in some top-line western productions, from Bend It Like Beckham to Lust, Caution and of course Silver Linings Playbook. Do you think that the 90 percent-10 percent rule is not really applicable in Indian films?

Anupam Kher: It is not. We have 22 official languages and some 3,000 dialects. Our food habits change every 500km. We have to speak a line in Hindi and somebody in Tamil Nadu, somebody in Telangana, somebody in Gujarat has to understand. It’s easy if there is one language which everybody understands, like in Polish cinema, Iranian cinema, even American cinema. .

Indian actors are amazing. They do things that are not the most subtle in the world of cinema, and yet we make 1.4 billion people believe in it. The problem in contemporary times is that people think no acting is acting. We have a generation of actors now who are petrified of acting. They think being natural is acting. No. The naturalness that actors bring in the West is inherent in their culture. We are larger than life, more gregarious as a people.

A lot of actors today don’t act. Even if I say so myself, I was brilliant in the Nineties. I did the most unbelievable characters with complete conviction. I was actually doing that ‘makkhi choos’ sequence in Dil. Every time I ask children about my favourite film they will say ‘Dil’! Imagine trying to pull that off with a straight face and hoping audiences will buy it. I did Dil Hai Ki Maanta Nahin where the man walks with a little jump and flails about. I don’t think that actors today will be able to carry it off. I am not looking down upon these actors. I think they are very sincere but let’s also be clear that acting is not just ‘not acting’.

Coming to a couple of your recent performances, how did you go about preparing for The Kashmir Files? It is, as you mentioned, one of your most intense performances.

Anupam Kher: The Kashmir Files was a pent-up feeling of 32 years. Since the exodus of Kashmiri people started, the brutality that was inflicted upon them. Every 19th of January we will stand up and sort of say justice for Kashmiri Pandits, etc. Vivek Agnihotri went to America and other cities in the world and interviewed these people who had to run away from their home. It’s not just the walls and the roof you leave behind… you leave smells, you leave roots. The film was a catharsis. A purgation. It was a cry to tell the truth of that tragedy. I was representing my character and my character was representing that community of Kashmiri Pandits. It was on my shoulders to show whatever was happening. I had to stick to the truth.

I always say that this film has my soul in it. Maybe this is what soulful performances mean. I had to just think about Tika Lal Taploo. I had to think of so many people. My memories of my uncle who had to leave his house soon after he built it. He almost went insane. The actors in the crowd were actual Kashmiri Pandits. Every time I gave a shot, the tears were real because one was living what one had gone through. There is something called emotional memory in an actor’s mind. So, that is what I was using.

And how does that square up for the portrayal of Rabindranath Tagore?

Anupam Kher: I am not supposed to talk about the film…. I went to Santiniketan on a trip and stayed there for two days. At that time, the film had not come up. I was amazed that they have still kept the tradition of those schools outside. When I went to the museum, I saw that chair, I saw where he lay down, I saw where he walked. I was told by the vice-chancellor how he used to be sad when he left Santiniketan and why he was wearing dark glasses. Those pictures stayed in my mind. Those postures and that feel of him having lived there, it is like when you go to any other museum. Recently I went to Vietnam and I went to the Vietnam museum, oh my god, I could not deal with it. And similarly, the greatest man from India lived there. I felt his soul there. It is a very brief appearance of Tagore in the larger scheme of things. But I thought this is an opportunity to not only look like Tagore, but to also imbibe his soul in a still photograph.

Did the negativity on social media that came with that photograph affect you?

Anupam Kher: Yes, it did bother me, because my intention was not to do what was being imputed. He is after all a national treasure. I am approaching the role with an experience of 50 years in theatre, in cinema…. I think we live in a society where some people will always be negative. And people will show who they are. So, negative people will show negativity, positive people will show positivity. Luckily, the ratio is phenomenally skewed in favour of positive people. But because negative people get noticed and that is their only claim to fame, I came in for criticism. There are two kinds of people in the world: doers and criticisers. I am happy that I am a doer. I will rather do and fail than not do it.

(Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film and music buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer.

Neha Tiwari Bhattacharyya has helped with the transcription of this interview.)