I was selfish with Urmila: RGV on heroines and regrets

I have often been credited with discovering talent and giving many actors and technical people breaks. But the plain truth is that I gave them their breaks, not because I divined some great genius in them and could foresee future acclaim for them. Quite honestly, I never thought anything of anybody. The reason I took Anurag Kashyap in Satya had nothing to do with my perception of his talent, but it was because he was the first writer to approach me after I decided to make the film. And later on he got Saurabh Shukla to join as a co-writer. Why I credited Saurabh ahead of Anurag in the titles of Satya was because he was older in age than Anurag.

People thought Anurag was the main guy of the two because I continued to work with Anurag and not Saurabh. The reason I did so was because Saurabh got married and he did not have as much time as Anurag to hang out with me. Similarly, I did not think that Shimit Amin of Ab Tak Chhappan was more talented than Prawaal Raman of Gayab just because Ab Tak Chhappan was a hit and Gayab a flop. On the contrary, I believe that given the material of Ab Tak Chhappan, Prawaal would have made a better film, and given the material of Gayab, Shimit might have come up with a worse film. But that’s just my opinion and it’s not necessarily true.

I made Satya and Daud back-to back. So who is the real me? Anurag made No Smoking and Dev D. So who is the real Anurag?

Shock

I was at my office in Mumbai, when my receptionist called me and said that someone called Basu Chatterjee had come to meet me. I asked the receptionist, "Who is he?" and the receptionist said, "He claims that he is a director." I got a shock and wondered why he had come. I walked to the reception to see a gentle-looking elderly man and welcomed him into my room. I offered him coffee and started telling him how I used to watch his films. He smiled and told me that he was aware of it, as I had mentioned it many a time in my interviews over the years. After a chat he finally told me why he had come. Apparently he had a script and a producer but he did not have access to any actors. He was desperately trying to get in touch with Manoj Bajpai but was unable to do so. So he had to seek my help in accessing Manoj.

I said, "Sure", went into the other room and called Manoj. His phone was switched off, so I called his secretary. The secretary told me Manoj was out of town and when I asked him if they knew that Basu Chatterjee was trying to get in touch, Manoj's secretary said, "Yes I am figuring out how to get rid of him."

I was pretty taken aback. I realised that while Manoj couldn’t have been capable of such abruptness, he, for whatever reason, was not interested in working with Basu Chatterjee. I came back and told Basuji, "Manoj is not in town, so I will talk to him and get back." He chatted for some more time and left.

Heroines

Over the years, the media has linked me with many women, partly because I have a tendency to cast some of them again and again in my films. But then I work again and again with many male actors and technicians too. But I guess since women make more interesting copy, the media always focuses only on that aspect of my interactions. Having said that, I have to admit that some of the media speculations are true and some untrue... but, out of respect for the privacy of my heroines, I am not going to specify which ones are true and which are not.

The first heroine I was bowled over by was Sridevi and that was when I was just a viewer and hadn’t yet come into films. When I first met her I felt I had walked from the theatre straight into the screen. Over a period of time, I became close to that real Sridevi and for the first time consciously understood the difference between fantasy and reality.

After coming into films, the first girl to have an impact on me was Urmila Matondkar. I was mesmerised by her beauty — from her face to her figure... everything about her was just divine. She had done a few films before Rangeela, which hadn’t done well and she hadn’t made much of an impact on the audience either. Then, after Rangeela, she became the nation’s sex symbol. That doesn’t mean it was I who made her look beautiful. I would say that she was a painting and I simply framed her. Apart from the frame, for a painting to be truly relished, it also needs the right place for it to be displayed in, and that place was Rangeela.

One of my primary motives in making Rangeela was to capture Urmila’s beauty eternally on camera and to make it a benchmark for sex symbols. I would say that I have never felt more of a cinematic high than when I watched her through my camera on the sets of Rangeela.

I don’t know how this may sound, but my biggest problem with Urmila on a personal front was that I just couldn’t accept her being an ordinary human being. I know that is a very unrealistic expectation from any woman but then you have to understand that I am a very filmy person. She was, in person, a simple sweetheart but I, very selfishly, always wanted her to be larger-than-life even in real life.

Guilt

Of all the actors I have introduced, the one I truly feel guilty about is Nisha Kothari. I still remember the first time I saw the cute, innocent, wide-eyed girl from Delhi whom I cast in the film James, which I produced. While James was being made, I was directing Sarkar and I cast Nisha in a small but very memorable role in it, in which she was really appreciated. My big mistake with regard to Nisha was to weigh her down with the role of Basanti in Aag, my remake of Sholay. It’s another matter that in Aag, I let down even great actors like Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn and Sushmita Sen. But for an upcoming actor like Nisha, it was really damaging. Whether out of arrogance or overconfidence or plain foolishness, I made her suffer a crippling blow to her career and I still feel tremendously guilty about it.

(Reprinted with the publisher's permission.)