“It’s nice to be on another director’s set. I’m a trained stage actor. I play a villain in ‘Kaminey’ and this gives me a chance to test my skills in unexpected ways. I have a very dramatic role. What fabulous actors Shahid Kapur and Priyanka are! And I’m enjoying every bit of it,” Amol told us.
Amol said he is intrigued why director Vishal Bharadwaj chose him for the role.
“I don’t know what made Vishal think of me,” said Amol, who finishes his schedule for ‘Kaminey’ on Friday in Hyderabad and returns to Mumbai to renew work on his recently started production house.
Not too many people know Amol played the lead in Dayal Nihalani’s ‘Guru Dakshina’ in the 1980s.
“I’ve been a part of the FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) campus films for eight years, and I’ve participated in 110 diploma films as actor, writer and director. I was an actor in Ketan Mehta’s ‘Holi’. That’s when I had met Aamir Khan first.
“For me, writing a script also entails doing the dialogues so I know what kind of performance to get from the actor. To me, every artistic tradition – from popular to folk to classical – is part of the same scheme.
“In Maharashtra, theatre and folk culture are very strong. They had very strong influences on me. I even did the costumes in Ketan Mehta’s ‘Mirch Masala’. I’m as fascinated by world cinema as Indian cinema. That’s why I’m happy when ‘Taare Zameen Par’ goes to the Oscars.”
Amol, who was billed the ‘writer and creative director’ of ‘Taare Zameen Par’, can’t help noticing that a film which fought tooth and nail against the competitive spirit, has gone to a glamorous global competitive platform.
“‘Taare…’, which was about how cut-throat competition smothers the creative spirit, is going from one competition to another, now to the Oscars,” he remarked.
Amol has seen some of the other films that were considered as Indian entries for the Oscars.
“And the two Marathi films ‘Tingya’ and ‘Valu’ and the Hindi movie ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’ were fabulous. Any of these could’ve comfortably gone to the Oscars. So again like my ‘Taare…’, where I questioned the practice of pitching one child’s talent against another, I wonder how all these films can be pitched against one another. They’re so different. And so deserving, but for the sake of a wider reach, I want ‘Taare…’ to win the Oscar.
