Covering Bollywood and the Hindi Cinema

Vivek Oberoi is back with a vengeance and if you don’t believe me just check out his performance in Shootout At Lokhandwala. The actor has been garnering  a lot of praise for his portrayal of Maya, the gangster and Rajeev Masand caught up with him.

Rajeev Masand:   I remember you said that you always like to go well prepared to a set. For you first film Company, didn’t you spend a lot of time in trains, on make-up, your hair and your look before you landed up on the set to play Chandu? Is that something you have been consistent in?

Vivek Oberoi: No, that’s one of the interesting things about me. I am consistently inconsistent. So there have been roles where I’ve been inspired by roles to go to the root of it and there have been times when I’ve felt I can just walkthrough characters. Not that I didn’t want to work hard on it but there was just nothing to work hard on. So I have tried everything.

Rajeev Masand: What were the roles that did not require back preparation?

Vivek Oberoi: For Saathiya, I didn’t learn any dialogues, I didn’t use make-up. I landed up on the set, read the dialogues once and just let it flow because I wanted to keep it as real as possible and I felt the character was not too far away from who I was. But I couldn’t do that for something like Shootout At Lokhandwala. For someone like Maya, I had to understand him. I took time off, went back to my old pattern of doing only one film at a time with the right amount of preparation, especially since I was portraying for the first time, a real character.

Rajeev Masand: You play Maya, the gangster. So what was the preparation? I know you have been spending time with cops and people on the other side of the law. What does it entail?

Vivek Oberoi: I have done a lot of interviews. I spoke to a lot of people who are in jail right now, convicts and those who have served time. What’s interesting is that a small number of them feel guilty. A lot of them brag, like ‘I’ve killed 10, I’ve killed 12.’

Rajeev Masand: Do you relate to that?

Vivek Oberoi: I understand there’s a pattern to it. If you kill one person or two people, you are a murderer. If you kill 10 or 20, people are scared of you, you are a legend and people are in awe of you. That’s the difference. It’s strange and we, as a society we should look into it. We make that happen.

Rajeev Masand: Are you expecting the same kind of criticism like the way Company did, for almost glorifying and sexifying violence?

Vivek Oberoi: I love that word ‘sexifying’. Is that really a word?

Rajeev Masand: Probably not.

Vivek Oberoi: I love that you coined it. Congratulations. Can I borrow it?

Rajeev Masand: Yes, you can.

Vivek Oberoi: It’s actually not about glorifying violence as much as it is about showing the state of mind the person is in. Let me explain. You see kids driving on a bandstand. They are in a fast car. There are four of them flying at 150 km per hour. If you can understand what’s going on in his head at that moment, with the girl sitting next to him screaming ‘wow’, he steps on to the accelerator, he feels immortal, like he’s God, like he’s flying. He feels there is nothing between him and the road. And there’s just one instant when something comes in front of him, he crashes and it’s all over. He dies. But in the moment before that he feels he’s larger than life. So we have tried to capture that essence.