The great Boman Irani, talks with Subhash K Jha, about his experience working on Lage Raho Munna Bhai, acting with Sanjay Duttand why he thinks these film’s are so special.
20 years of Lage Raho Munna Bhai , which many regard as superior to the first Munnabhai film, how would you rate it and where would you place it in your impressive repertoire?
For me, this is a far more successful film because the subject that it picked on was a bigger bite than just one guy doing sweet things and, you know, making it like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, so to speak. But when you pick up an iconic character like Gandhi and, back in the day, one would say to make a commercial film with Gandhiji being one of the main leads, you might turn around and say, I mean, that’s not a recipe for box office success. That can be, and these are notions, of course, that could be boring, that could be preachy, that could be, I’m not going to the theatre to listen to epithets and what have you. But what it actually did was made it so hugely entertaining and that fine balance which Raju Hirani managed was its greatest victory. To make Gandhiji accessible, make Gandhiji, not him directly, but through him find some, find a hell of a lot of humour and make Gandhiji so relevant even then and probably even today. So for me, a huge, huge success as far as cinema is concerned.
Please walk me through Munna Bhai and its sequel, what was your reaction to being offered the films?
The character I played … the timelines may not match, but I had done a film called Khosla Ka Ghosl three years earlier. In fact, just soon after Munna Bhai MBBS and the character had a similar tone to the one in Lage Raho Munna Bhai . So I kept telling Mr. Hirani, that the character Lucky Singh I was playing had a lot of similarity to Khosla Ka Ghosla. Mr. Hirani told me not to worry about it. But one has to worry to make sure that there’s a land grabbing builder and both are Punjabi speaking to make sure that it’s not a repetition. So I had to make sure that the character that I played as was a Sardar, very specific to a Sardar that lived in Mumbai, spoke a little bit of Marathi, which gave the Sardar a little authenticity from where he works, his habitat, how he operates, his smoothness, his ability to lie at the drop of a hat. I found him literally in Lamington Road.
What do you mean?
Let me put it that this Sardar, this bunch of Sardars, I found at Lamington Road at the spare part market and the tyre and the tyre tube market. And I used to go and sit over there and spend a hell of a lot of time with them, including the clothes, directly borrowed from a hell of a lot of Sardarjis who were most forthcoming with their anecdotes and their little nuances they would feed me with. I would sit behind the counter and sometimes even sell tires, tubes, chains, and what have you. Though one of them finally told me, he said, ‘There’s no point in capturing the true essence of who we are if you’re going to just sit at our shop and be polite with us, saying come to Sion Koliwada where we live, and there’s this little beer bar that we meet every day in the evening.’ So one day in the evening at 8.30 I got dressed, I’m telling the wife I’m off to work. So where are you going to? I’m going to a beer bar, and we sit over there, and the authenticity of my character, Lucky Singh, came true only in that environment. So it gave me a lot of aplomb to deal with meeting all their friends and themselves in their everyday, very jocular environment.
What was your rapport with Vidhu Vinod Chopra, did he give you room to improvise?
My rapport with Vinod Chopra and Raju Hirani has always been fabulous to this very day. Yeah, a character like that would improvise, especially in the physical parts. Even in the spoken parts, once or twice, one can improvise. I improvised much, much more on the lines in Munna Bhai MBBS, but in Lage Raho Munna Bhai it was more the physicality. When Gandhi ji was sitting next to me and he’s talking to Gandhi ji and I’m trying to figure out who is he talking to and I’m waving a little cushion left and right, a lot of that was improvised. It was great fun doing those little scenes.
How was Sanjay Dutt as a co-star?
Sanjay Dutt is the most fabulous co-star one can ever hope. But we had a great team. There was Vidya Balan, and there was, of course, Arshad Warsi, who are all great friends, and we hang out together. I did not spend too much time with Gandhi ji himself because, you know, one has to be careful what one says, even though he’s a character, one has to be extremely, I don’t know why I was being so reverent with the wonderful actor Dilip Prabhavalkar. He did so very well in that part.
How would you like to explain the durability and relevance of the Munnabhai films?
I think the durability and the relevance of Munna Bhai films is just a little injection of humanity in times that we can go berserk with our day-to-day existence in the ratrace. Our actions are based on survival, and sometimes those actions can be questionable. I think a movie like Munna Bhai, when a gunda speaks to you, a bhai speaks to you and tells you there is always room for humanity, kindness, and a little bit of love, it goes a long way. That can never grow old.
Any regrets about no Munna Bhai 3?
Yeah, regrets about the third part not being made. I have given up on that conversation. It’ll happen when it happens.
