On Aamir:
My working with Aamir was pretty accidental. I am not from a filmi family. A friend of mine who was working with Lagaan asked me if I would like to work as part of the team, and I agreed. Prior to that, I must have watched, like, ten Hindi movies in my life. I didn’t know much about Hindi films at all” – “and one of the films she did know about was Rangeela ,” Aamir gleefully interrupts here. Rangeela?
“I had to write a paper on Rangeela when I was in MCRC in Jamia,” Kiran explains. And then tells us about another Aamir connection. “Oddly enough, for no particular reason, QSQT was the first complete Hindi film I ever watched, as a young adult. I must have been about 14 then. I’ll never forget that because, it was the first movie I watched on our new VCR.”
After Lagaan , we worked together on TZP, after almost four years. So it isn’t as if we work together all the time. But working with Aamir is a really amazing experience. It’s exciting and intense, and yet it’s a lot of fun... I knew that working with him was something I would love to do all my life. We work well together, and while as professionals we have our own aesthetics, our own ideas, we still understand each other and have a lot of common ground.” If they work that well together, what is the rationale of the new venture, then?
“Nobody lets Aamir ‘get away’ with anything,” she laughs. “He does what he wants to, pretty much. He listens to everyone but does what he wants to. And I know he’ll put it aside soon, once he decides to. You see, Aamir has an amazingly obsessive personality. When he latches on to something, he just doesn’t let go... Like when he was training, he’s spend four hours, five hours a day in the gym. Nothing is by half measures. Everything he does is by heaped measures!” What’s Mr Khan’s take on this? “One of my favourite authors, Harry Crews, has said, what deserves to be done, deserves to be overdone!”
On Her Company:
“The reason I started an independent company is because I am interested in cinema for cinema’s sake. I don’t understand the dynamics of commercial cinema very well. I watch a lot of films, experimental, avant-grade, animation – I’d like to see more films like the one I am making, I feel it needs encouragement of a different nature from commercial cinema, which is driven by market requirements. Besides the films I direct, as a producer I hope to take up subjects that mainstream producers will shy away from handling.”
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