Today I came across stories of two directors who handle their actors in very different ways. The first is Aziz Mirza who’s directing Shahid Kapoor in Kismat Konnection and the other is Anurag Kashyap who’s working with Abhay Deol in Dev D, a modernisation of Devdas.
Shahid has been surprised with the connection (no pun intended, seriously) he’s made with Aziz, since the director is much older than him. A day’s shooting gone wrong proved how young at heart Aziz Mirza really is. As the director’s son started freaking out about re-doing the shoot, Aziz walked in, laughed, told everyone to chill and have fun, after all, it was just a movie. Now how can it be difficult to work with a director like that?
Anurag Kashyap uses different methods to get the best out of his actors however. We know in the film, Devdas spends half the movie in a drunken stupor, so its kind off disturbing when your Devdas can’t play up his drunkenness and subsequent hangover. If someone can’t pretend to have a convincing hangover, the only way to fix that is…to give your actor an actual hangover. By throwing an impromptu cast party, Anurag did exactly that, getting Abhay drunk and then keeping him up most of the night. Guess what? Abhay didn’t have to act the next morning and Anurag was very pleased with the scene.
So they’re like two teachers, one who encourages fun and doesn’t mind if your homework is a little bit late and one who insists that you get your homework done at all costs, even if it means gutting the dog who ate it.
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