Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who is known for films like 12th Fail, Parinda, Shikara among others, recently recalled how he got around to casting Jackie Shroff in Parinda and said that at that time, Jackie was known as a “wooden actor.” So much so that even the decision to cast Jackie in the film came about only after Naseeruddin Shah challenged him to do so. In a chat at the ongoing International Film Festival of India, Goa, Vidhu recalled how the experience on Parinda pushed Jackie to become a better actor.
He shared, “Everybody called Jackie the wooden actor. He was always told and I was told that you cannot make Jackie Shroff act… by Naseer actually.” Vinod said that initially, Naseeruddin was supposed to play this role but after he and Vinod got in a fight, Naseer refused to work in his film. “Naseer was supposed to be in the film. We had a fight, he said ‘I won’t do it’. I said okay. He said, ‘If you are a great director make Jackie Shroff act’. And I was very angry and very young. I said ‘You watch it, I will do it’,” he recalled.
Vinod recalled narrating the script to Jackie and shared his first reaction. “The first thing he told me ‘Bhidu tu sambhal lena, mereko acting nahi aata, tu sambhal lena (Bro, you take care of it. I don’t know how to act.)’,” he recalled. To make him feel comfortable, Vinod told him that he had guru in Kashmir who had given him a mantra. “I said I will give it to you, you chant it 100 times in the morning and everything will work out. I wrote the mantra and sent it to him. After 15 minutes, he calls me and starts abusing. I had written the mantra ‘I can act’. I said you have to say it because if you can’t believe it, then how will you do it?”
Vinod recalled that Jackie’s biggest problem was landing on the right mark while performing a scene. He explained that while shooting a staged scene, an actor has to land on a certain mark so the camera catches him correctly but Jackie always had a problem with this. So to overcome this obstacle, he told his cinematographer Binod Pradhan to light the scene in a way that Jackie wouldn’t require a mark. “I told my cameraman, let him go wherever he wants,” he recalled.
“When Jackie came, I explained the scene to him. The first thing he asked me was ‘Where is the mark?’ I said, Jaggu there is no mark, you go wherever you want. He got angry. He said ‘What do you mean there is no mark? Where do I go?’ I said ‘wherever you want.’ He said you have come from FTII after studying direction, I can only act if you direct and he lost his temper totally. He screamed at Binod and me and then he left. Half an hour later, he comes back and says to me, ‘I will start from the window because this is my dream and this is how I will start my scene.’ This was the beginning of Jackie Shroff who won the Best Actor award for Parinda,” he said.
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