Kriti Sanon analyses her career graph and the lessons she learns from each film with Unnati Joshi
Kriti Sanon became a sensation playing a girl next door in Sabbir Khan’s Heropanti. And, since then, there has been no looking back for her. She is clearly the girl of the moment. A film with Shah Rukh Khan, multiple releases lined up, a couple of endorsements and back to back interviews for her forthcoming film, Raabta. She is on a breakneck speed.
She had just finished an interaction with a publication and we were next. Adjusting her hair, she welcomed us with a big smile. “How are you managing all of thisIJ” we asked. “It’s a little hectic but exciting,” she smiled. “I am growing everyday. That has been my motive. It’s something which is important otherwise life becomes very stagnant,” added she.
Kriti had a spontaneous smile that got wider when we asked about her speed run. Away from the lime-light, she was pursuing her Bachelor of Technology in Electronics and Communication Engineering. While she was modelling to just “give a shot”, she got a few ads and a Telugu film, Nenokkadine. Then Heropanti happened and she was a star overnight. “So, I had not done any training in acting or theatre. I was like a baby taking mini steps and learning camera basics. Of course in Heropanti, I had a character with several layers. She was bratty but at the same time naive. I tried giving my best according to my understanding at that point of time. Then Dilwale happened. It was more like an ensemble film. There was not so much to work as an actor. My character was also simpler. So, there it was more about the zone and world of Rohit Shetty. But working with Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol was a great learning experience. Watching them was big. Now Raabta has given me an opportunity where I got two characters which were really layered. Now, I am also aware of the process of sorting characters in my head. I am still trying to figure out what works for me and what doesn’t,” she said with a nervous giggle.
“Dinesh Vijan (director) really helped me to find out a lot of things in the process. He used to sit with me and tell me about the characters. We were finding out Saira (Kriti’s character) together. With Raabta, I started loving the prep process. I started liking the process of finding the character. What’s the way she walksIJ What does she think when she’s saying certain linesIJ What’s her thought process likeIJ What has she gone through in her life that has made her the way she isIJ” she added.
About her characters, she shared, “So, when you see Saira, you get that she is a little off but you can’t exactly point out the reason. Saira is someone who would just go out on her own and enjoy. It’s very opposite to how I am. I will never even step out of my hotel if I don’t have company. That was interesting for me. Then there’s Saiba. She is also very different from me as I am someone who can get scared of anything. Saiba is fearless and possesses a character which is so away from our time. As we can’t relate much to them, it’s difficult to know what goes in their mind or what kind of life they have led. I was completely a director’s actor in this film. I am not that kind of a person who can go back to my emotional memory and reflect it in a scene and cry. I need to be in that zone and think about what the character had gone through just before the event. And so, I had given myself to Dinesh completely. This film gave me an opportunity to play two characters that are very different from each other.”
She continued, “Saira lives in Budapest and makes chocolates. She gets these really bad dreams which she doesn’t understand but they are a part of her life and she makes peace with them somehow. She is a little quirky, abrupt but at the same time she is really endearing. While Saiba is completely fearless and can do anything to protect her life and she knows that she is the most beautiful woman in that place. And so, a little arrogant too.”
About the jumps in the film, she said, “We take you in the flashbacks for twenty to thirty minutes. Raabta is about the unexplainable connection that you sometimes feel with another person who you are not related to. There is no logic to it. But there’s this very strong connect which you don’t understand. It’s just a beautiful thought that this connection might be from another time or another life.I had gone to meet Dinesh Vijay for another project, where he ended up narrating Raabta’s story to me randomly. And I remember just being completely engrossed in it. I was going with him into every scene, laughing at the scene that he was narrating to me, feeling for the characters. So I was really there. After that four- hour long meeting, I went back home and for two days, this story really stuck in my head. Finally, I messaged him, ‘listen, the other film you had narrated to me, I absolutely loved the story and why are you not making itIJ’ He told me to come to his office. When I went there, I found out that Sushant was already on board. Then Dinesh gave us a scene and said, ‘Take ten minutes and we will do this scene together. Sushant and I, we had never met before that. We didn’t know each other at all. So, after two-three takes, something happened and we started completing each other’s lines. It wasn’t like we were saying dialogues. It became a little more life-like, which we call chemistry I think. So, the chemistry was somewhere there even when we didn’t know each other at all.”
Carrying the weight of this “chemistry” has been hard on Kriti, who is always spoken or written about in the context of her alleged real-life closeness to Sushant. But now she has learnt to take things in her stride because she knows that women actors are judged that much more. “Sometimes I feel it is a crime to repeat even clothes. It’s a deal now to wear different things at the airport. Even if not airport, outside a restaurant or a salon or a gym, you never know where the photographers are. The constant pressure of being dressed appropriately is there in your head, which is not a part of being an actor. It’s a little stressful at times. But slowly, I feel there will come a time when we will stop getting bothered about it and wear whatever we want to at least until we are wearing clothes. like now, I don’t care if I am clicked in my gym clothes,” she said.
She then steered the conversation towards content of new-age films. “There are a lot of times when a bad film does really well and a good film doesn’t do well because big actors are not part of it. It’s the content of the film which should matter. It will give a lot of people the motivation to make more such films and try and experiment in different genres. People should not think whether a film is commercial or not. They should judge it on the basis of its content. And I really hope this happens someday.”
Future plansIJ “Bareilly Ki Barfi is coming in July and I am really excited about it. It’s a very different film. A sweet and quirky kind. I am playing a UP girl for the first time. It’s completely different from Raabta or any film that I have done before and working with actors like Ayushmann Khurrana, Pankaj Tripathi, Rajkummar Rao and Seema Pahwa has been a great journey. Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari is a fabulous director. Her thinking sensibilities are amazing. Nitesh Tiwari has beautifully written the film and every dialogue will make you laugh. It has got a subtle heartland humour which will be explored after a long time,” she said signing off.
Photo: Pankaj Kumar