Abhishek has won the best actor award at the Melbourne film festival for your film I Want To Talk? This is like a sheer joy for me. I was dancing, you know, when the winner was announced. I mean, I can’t tell you how happy I am. I’m so glad that he won for this film. I always believed since the first shot of this film, the way we started talking about this film, and I took that first shot, I remember how genuine he was, how real he was, he deserved every bit of it.
His father is very happy? I got a congratulations message from Mr. Bachchan too. I wrote back that it was all possible because of you, because I worked with you (the senior Bachchan). And that’s how I knew Abhishek. And that’s how I could cast. So I told Mr. Bachchan. Never in the film I felt it was Abhishek Bachchan. I always felt that it was the character Arjun Sen.
Was Abhishek your first choice for playing Arjun Sen? While doing the research about Arjun Sen, the kind of mannerisms that Abhishek picked up, the kind of personality Arjun Sen is—always talking and blabbering. The initial voiceover about manipulation, that he hates manipulation, but he constantly is manipulating with his body. Abhishek somewhere connected and it touched him personally also. And he was so much into it that we didn’t recognize him as Abhishek Bachchan when he was performing. He absolutely melted in that character of Arjun Sen. I must tell you something about Abhishek.
Do tell? When I started talking to him about the film and I met him, apart from him being such a fantastic and a beautiful human being, he was a thorough gentleman. He is so knowledgeable. He knew about all those, you know, medical science issues regarding what Arjun Sen was going through, the surgeries that he went through, and his relationship with his daughter. All that, somehow I felt that he was grasping it in terms of his personality, and he also being a father, me being a father.
Many more people should watch I Want To Talk? This is a richly deserved award for Abhishek. Let people watch this film. A lot of people yet haven’t watched this film. I really want them to watch it and see how talented he is, how artistic he is in this film. I hope everybody recognizes him as the great actor that he is.
