I feel a performer’s character should be like a riddle: Neeraj Kabi | Bengali Movie News - Times of India (2024)

Neeraj Kabi speaks fluently in Bengali when we meet him on the first day of his shoot in Kolkata, a language he picked up in his hometown of Jamshedpur. The theatre actor and mentor who won accolades for his performances in Ship of Theseus, Byomkesh Bakshy,

Paatal Lok

, and

Once Again

, will be seen opposite Divya Dutta in a film inspired by Captain Anirban Bandopadhyay, who was martyred in Kupwara. Excerpts from a conversation that is unspooled between takes and lunch breaks.
"A performer’s character should be like a riddle. As an audience, you should not be able to really come to terms with what you have just seen, yet extremely touched in a personal way by the performance" - Neeraj Kabi

It’s been 12 years since Ship of Theseus was released. At that time you spoke about the way the industry functioned and the kind of work you were getting, or not, as an artiste. How have things changed for you?

I feel now the desire to do much bigger work than I have done ever. When I say big, I don’t mean box-office big or fame big. I mean as an artiste, the characters that I want to explore, right now. This is the time I feel, I should be really dealing with stories which attract the craft that I have been evolving with for such a long time and creating and training for myself. Till Paatal Lok, the journey was fabulous because so many kinds of stories came my way and such amazing producers, directors and actors that I got to work with. Irrfan, Nawazuddin (Siddiqui), Manoj Bajpayee, Kay Kay Menon, Dibakar Banerjee, Anurag Kashyap, Shyam Benegal,

Goutam Ghose... But post Paatal Lok, I feel there is a deep desire for something much bigger. I am waiting for that opportunity.

In some of your projects such as Talvar or Once Again, there’s a very interesting use of silences in your work. How do you use pauses in theatre and before the camera?
As an actor, you must know the medium you’re working with. These pauses will not work on the stage. The space is too big, the audiences are too far away from you. You cannot take pauses. Even a one-second pause on screen is like a 10-20 second pause on stage. The audiences are straining to look at you and you’re straining to pull your voice and push it right up to them. So everything is dialled up, powerful. In cinema, the camera comes to you. The lens zooms in. And that is where you have the advantage. These pauses are human. They come from your soul. If I were to do Once Again, as a theatre performance, with

Shefali

(Shah) , it would be a very different thing altogether.

Tell us about this film directed by Indira Dhar Mukkherjee. What about the script or the character appealed to you?
I don’t do father roles. I agreed only for Talvar. That too because it was about a young girl. Besides, I won’t even be convincing as a father. Although you can’t say no in the industry, one may be typecast in a particular way because the stories are not written for the father. But Indira convinced me to hear her out. She knew her script back to front. Her narration was almost a performance in speech. She would actually look at me and then say the lines. That impressed me immediately, and the fact that this was a story about war and real events and a truly international project.
How did you approach your character in this film?
In this film I have very few lines. It will see me in a physical performance - when you don’t have words to be spoken and to express, then your eyes, your breathing, your staying, your pauses, all those come into play. Col Rabindranath Bandopadhyay is first of all an army man. He has seen two wars, he has fought them. He is not a person who is going to be very expressive in the face. But he has lost his son in the army. And he is looking at his wife who is almost now going down gradually, in the medical sense. So, that is a big pain. Here, I use my face, almost mask-like and the body and channel my craft to capture all those emotions.

There was a certain sense of conflict with the film industry in 2012. Do you consider yourself to be a part of the frame now? Or are you still on the periphery?
That’s a very tricky question. Because it’s a very thin line. There are moments where I say that no, I’m really not a part of this. I want to take a step back. There are many moments where I feel I’m part of it. I don’t want to give the audience what they want. I want to give the audience what they deserve. I’ve said this even earlier. I feel we have a very intelligent audience in our country. We’re not giving them what they deserve. And that limits your work as an actor. We need to take that creative risk.
‘I like working with actors who are uninhibited’
Speaking about Once Again, Neeraj said, “I liked the rawness of the director and how he used the Mumbai landscape as his art direction. How he kept me, the character of what I was playing, on top somewhere on the 15th or 18th floor. And Shefali (Shah) was right down. He played with dynamics, the geography. Shefali is a brilliant performer. I enjoy working with actors who leave themselves at home and come completely uninhibited, to do a jugalbandi together.”
‘In theatre after theatre, I saw the audience clap after the watching Ship of Theseus. They really were blown by what they saw, what they felt in their heart. I’m still waiting for that to happen again,’ Neeraj said about his peformance in the film

"An international film is not taking your DOP from America, your writer from England. It is a story that needs to be told all across the world and it makes sense at every corner of this planet. Like Ek Ruka Hua Faisla, which I just completed", said Neeraj Kabi
‘Filmmaking is very safely played (in India)’
Filmmaking is a unique, big creative business. But everything is very safely played. I understand the challenges, but I wish everyone would get a little more courage to really push forward. Given the rich diversity of our languages, I think we can make wonderful stories, beyond what we normally take to the Oscars.