AAMIR KHAN : MR BLOCKBUSTER
He quit studies after Class XII at Mumbai's N.M. College much to his parents' horror, choosing to work as an assistant director for four years. After his pin-up worthy debut in 1988, he wept every day coming home from work, convinced that the nine films he had signed in a rush would crash his career. Then in 2002, after he separated from Reena, his wife of 16 years, he drank a bottle of Bacardi every day for a year-and-a-half, except for the six hours a week and every alternative weekend he would see his children. Not what you would call the perfect ingredients for success. But Aamir Hussain Khan, all 44 years and 5 ft 7 inches of him, his wife's diamond studs twinkling in ears pierced for Lagaan, has always swum against the tide.
Only now the tide seems to be swimming with him. He's just starred in 3 Idiots, a film that has been breaking box office records at home and abroad, making Rs 240 crore in 10 days and still counting. His last four films, released over three successive years, Rang De Basanti, Fanaa, Taare Zameen Par and Ghajini, made a collective box office revenue of over Rs 590 crore. He makes an average of Rs 10 crore a year from each of the six brands he endorses. The way he marketed Ghajini will now be taught as part of a course in film marketing at IIM-Ahmedabad. The profit he is contemplating from 3 Idiots, as a result of a wise decision to forego his fees and split the profit three ways between producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra, director Raju Hirani and himself, will be over Rs 20 crore. But more than that, his films have consistently hit a nerve with audiences, either getting them to participate in candlelight vigils inspired by Rang De Basanti, treat children with greater sensitivity as in Taare Zameen Par or even cause them to bulk up their bodies as in Ghajini.
In an industry ripped apart by camps, he is his own institution, working with untested new directors (Farhan Akhtar in Dil Chahta Hai) and even failed filmmakers (Ashutosh Gowariker, who had two flops behind him, in Lagaan). He's been a producer for the smash hit Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na which starred his nephew and made Rs 115 crore at the box office, a director for Taare Zameen Par and even the unofficial CEO of Ghajini Inc. He shuns the awards circus and has never been seen in public performing song and dance routines. Yet his decision to act in one movie at a time is now a mass mantra and a sure career cure. His help was sought in resolving the two-month stand-off with multiplexes last year. And equally, his move to not charge a fee for 3 Idiots could set off a trend of stars putting their talent where their mouth is in these leaner, meaner times.
Yet as he sits folded up in his favourite chair in the projection room of his home, two floors below his mother's home where he was born and brought up, it is hard to think of the word superstar. He exudes an aura, but the room is more suited to that of a messy student, with books such as Katherine Frank's Indira to Abraham Verghese's The Tennis Partner sharing shelf space with PC games and Bob Dylan and Sufi qawwali CDs. The make-up room is stacked with the tools of his trade, from spare costumes to a wigmaker's dummy. And the terminal above his computer has chronologically labelled scripts. The actor himself is on his fourth coffee, talking about how he lost weight for his role of Rancho in 3 Idiots, which director Rajkumar Hirani rewrote for Khan. He speaks of how he modelled the 17-year-old on the boyish director of Ghajini, A.R. Murugadoss, and his 14-year-old nephew Pablo, who can never sit still. He jumps up to demonstrate, as he often does in his exuberance, contorting his body like an over-active teenager. "But Rancho was also dangerous because he is without a flaw. The audience's heart doesn't go out to such a guy. So I made him curious rather than cocky," he says.
Straight from the heart
"I feel I'm a special person and if someone does something to me, I just remove myself from that person's life."
"My brain is like a computer in its memory for scripts. It just soaks everything in and then it's in my head at all times. I'm often thinking of the part and it starts coming to me. Then I start collecting the information. Often it's not thought out."
"The two mistakes I made early on was signing nine films within six months of my debut and giving too much importance to scripts, not directors."
"A star's dependability is measured by his unsuccessful films. Whatever business it does is because of him."
"I was 16 when I realised I wanted to be an actor. My school friend Aditya Bhattacharya decided to cast me in a 40-minute silent film called Paranoia, financed with Rs 8,000 from actor Shriram Lagoo. Making that film convinced me that this is where I belonged. Shabana Azmi saw it and told my parents. All hell broke loose."
"Seeing my father go bankrupt when his film Locket was stuck for eight years taught me to be responsible to the market."
"My first instinct when I go home is to pick up a book, not the remote. I've been reading since I was six."
Thinking deeply about his character is something Khan has done increasingly, whether it is Bhuvan's stance in Lagaan, with his weight evenly distributed on his legs to suggest inner strength, or Aakash's darting eyes in Dil Chahta Hai indicating what a shallow layabout he is. Khan thinks in close-up, wide shot and mid-shot, in total physicality, says film scholar Nasreen Munni Kabir. He borrows a lot of his technique from observation-for one scene where Mona Singh slaps him while he is helping her deliver in 3 Idiots, he cheerfully admits to copying from his ex-wife Reena's difficult labour for their first born. And even more cheerfully says he loves talking to interesting new people. "Sometimes I feel like sucking their brains out."
Khan is a star who doesn't play himself in every film, as Amitabh Bachchan did at the height of his fame or Shah Rukh Khan tends to do. He plays the character, which may be why he tends to work with new directors, who help in creating a fresh persona every time. "Audiences now expect an element of surprise from him," points out Kabir. "Like a magician, they want him to conjure up a new character."
Once he has identified the perfect script, a director whose vision he shares, and a producer who will back it, Khan surrenders himself to the moment. There's no spillover, no hangover. Everything apart from the movie goes into soft focus. "When I read a script, it just goes straight to my brain," he says. "It's like a computer in its memory. It just soaks everything in and then it's in my head at all times," he adds, even as he acts out the first part he got in a play in Class XII. It was a line as a painter in a Gujarati play, a role he couldn't actually perform because he was sacked for missing a day of rehearsals. The line remains etched in his hard drive. He repeats it now: "Bloody hell, no one marries me. I wish his mother gets married to a dog."
On the sets, Khan is a trooper. He will hang out even when he doesn't have lines, or just play Scrabble with the assistants. He will promote the film across the country on every media he can find. And he will just not want to go home. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, who directed him in Rang De Basanti, and has been a friend since, says, "He makes himself completely accessible to the filmmaker." Kunal Kohli, who directed him in Fanaa, recalls how Khan was apologetic even asking him for four days off in the middle of the shoot in Mumbai in 2005 because he wanted to get married to Kiran Rao, a highly rated assistant director whose debut feature Dhobi Ghat will release this year. "He's there whether it is for readings or costume trials," adds Kohli. "And he's just incredibly intelligent. How many people do you know who can solve the Rubik's cube with one hand?"
Khan calls this quality "obsessive" and regrets that he cannot spend more time with his children, Junaid, 16, and Ira, 11, when he is acting in a film. His cousin, Nuzhat Hussain, a psychoanalyst, who lives in the building next door, has been close to him since he was 10 and she 15. She says the level of professionalism in his work where each person is given due respect is reflected in his personal life as well, where he is fastidious about his honesty. He simply cannot tell a lie. "But he is not superhuman. He does make mistakes. He hurts himself. But he is totally open to learning and feeling new things, which I think is an act of courage," says Hussain. Khan does have self-doubts. Personally, yes, and also professionally. But he refuses to compromise on his films. He says he learnt that lesson early on when he signed a spate of films in a hurry on the basis of their scripts and then realised the director's vision was completely different from his. He recalls that when he was at his lowest point, having been dismissed as a one film wonder, it was Mahesh Bhatt who offered him a hand, discussing a script with him, which as luck would have it, he didn't like it.
"He was at the peak of his talent, having just done Saaransh, Arth and Naam and I didn't know how I could tell him I didn't like his script. So I bought time, came home and asked Reena. She told me to follow my heart. I did, telling Bhattsaab that I wanted to do instead was a remake of one of my favourite films, Roman Holiday, with Sridevi. He listened but then took out a screenplay of Frank Capra's 1934 film It Happened One Night. Six months later, we would do the film together as Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin." That's a lesson of following his happiness that he hasn't forgotten since then. It's taught him to do things his way, to go with his gut instinct even when every practical sense is screaming no, as it did when Mehra narrated Rang De Basanti to him, which was coming on the heels of four Bhagat Singh flops. And if he still needs advice, he turns to Hussain, who is producer Nasir Hussain's daughter, and actor Imran Khan's mother. "She's one person I go to when I need to talk about anything," he says warmly. "She's a great thinker."
Stardom sits simply on him. Yes, there are the six bodyguards who travel everywhere with him. His man Friday Sachin, his girl Friday Sarita, and his manager Binki seem to stay awake all night. There is also the flashy Toyota Landcruiser and the Rs 10-crore sprawling house in Panchgani. But Khan is essentially a middle-class man, who thinks nothing of upturning the Body Shop shower gel to catch the last drop or blindly trusting his accountant of 20 years to invest his money well. It's ingrained in him because his most formative years, eight to 14, were spent in the shadow of his father, producer Tahir Hussain's imminent bankruptcy.
He quit studies after Class XII at Mumbai's N.M. College much to his parents' horror, choosing to work as an assistant director for four years. After his pin-up worthy debut in 1988, he wept every day coming home from work, convinced that the nine films he had signed in a rush would crash his career. Then in 2002, after he separated from Reena, his wife of 16 years, he drank a bottle of Bacardi every day for a year-and-a-half, except for the six hours a week and every alternative weekend he would see his children. Not what you would call the perfect ingredients for success. But Aamir Hussain Khan, all 44 years and 5 ft 7 inches of him, his wife's diamond studs twinkling in ears pierced for Lagaan, has always swum against the tide.
Only now the tide seems to be swimming with him. He's just starred in 3 Idiots, a film that has been breaking box office records at home and abroad, making Rs 240 crore in 10 days and still counting. His last four films, released over three successive years, Rang De Basanti, Fanaa, Taare Zameen Par and Ghajini, made a collective box office revenue of over Rs 590 crore. He makes an average of Rs 10 crore a year from each of the six brands he endorses. The way he marketed Ghajini will now be taught as part of a course in film marketing at IIM-Ahmedabad. The profit he is contemplating from 3 Idiots, as a result of a wise decision to forego his fees and split the profit three ways between producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra, director Raju Hirani and himself, will be over Rs 20 crore. But more than that, his films have consistently hit a nerve with audiences, either getting them to participate in candlelight vigils inspired by Rang De Basanti, treat children with greater sensitivity as in Taare Zameen Par or even cause them to bulk up their bodies as in Ghajini.
In an industry ripped apart by camps, he is his own institution, working with untested new directors (Farhan Akhtar in Dil Chahta Hai) and even failed filmmakers (Ashutosh Gowariker, who had two flops behind him, in Lagaan). He's been a producer for the smash hit Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na which starred his nephew and made Rs 115 crore at the box office, a director for Taare Zameen Par and even the unofficial CEO of Ghajini Inc. He shuns the awards circus and has never been seen in public performing song and dance routines. Yet his decision to act in one movie at a time is now a mass mantra and a sure career cure. His help was sought in resolving the two-month stand-off with multiplexes last year. And equally, his move to not charge a fee for 3 Idiots could set off a trend of stars putting their talent where their mouth is in these leaner, meaner times.
Yet as he sits folded up in his favourite chair in the projection room of his home, two floors below his mother's home where he was born and brought up, it is hard to think of the word superstar. He exudes an aura, but the room is more suited to that of a messy student, with books such as Katherine Frank's Indira to Abraham Verghese's The Tennis Partner sharing shelf space with PC games and Bob Dylan and Sufi qawwali CDs. The make-up room is stacked with the tools of his trade, from spare costumes to a wigmaker's dummy. And the terminal above his computer has chronologically labelled scripts. The actor himself is on his fourth coffee, talking about how he lost weight for his role of Rancho in 3 Idiots, which director Rajkumar Hirani rewrote for Khan. He speaks of how he modelled the 17-year-old on the boyish director of Ghajini, A.R. Murugadoss, and his 14-year-old nephew Pablo, who can never sit still. He jumps up to demonstrate, as he often does in his exuberance, contorting his body like an over-active teenager. "But Rancho was also dangerous because he is without a flaw. The audience's heart doesn't go out to such a guy. So I made him curious rather than cocky," he says.
Straight from the heart
"I feel I'm a special person and if someone does something to me, I just remove myself from that person's life."
"My brain is like a computer in its memory for scripts. It just soaks everything in and then it's in my head at all times. I'm often thinking of the part and it starts coming to me. Then I start collecting the information. Often it's not thought out."
"The two mistakes I made early on was signing nine films within six months of my debut and giving too much importance to scripts, not directors."
"A star's dependability is measured by his unsuccessful films. Whatever business it does is because of him."
"I was 16 when I realised I wanted to be an actor. My school friend Aditya Bhattacharya decided to cast me in a 40-minute silent film called Paranoia, financed with Rs 8,000 from actor Shriram Lagoo. Making that film convinced me that this is where I belonged. Shabana Azmi saw it and told my parents. All hell broke loose."
"Seeing my father go bankrupt when his film Locket was stuck for eight years taught me to be responsible to the market."
"My first instinct when I go home is to pick up a book, not the remote. I've been reading since I was six."
Thinking deeply about his character is something Khan has done increasingly, whether it is Bhuvan's stance in Lagaan, with his weight evenly distributed on his legs to suggest inner strength, or Aakash's darting eyes in Dil Chahta Hai indicating what a shallow layabout he is. Khan thinks in close-up, wide shot and mid-shot, in total physicality, says film scholar Nasreen Munni Kabir. He borrows a lot of his technique from observation-for one scene where Mona Singh slaps him while he is helping her deliver in 3 Idiots, he cheerfully admits to copying from his ex-wife Reena's difficult labour for their first born. And even more cheerfully says he loves talking to interesting new people. "Sometimes I feel like sucking their brains out."
Khan is a star who doesn't play himself in every film, as Amitabh Bachchan did at the height of his fame or Shah Rukh Khan tends to do. He plays the character, which may be why he tends to work with new directors, who help in creating a fresh persona every time. "Audiences now expect an element of surprise from him," points out Kabir. "Like a magician, they want him to conjure up a new character."
Once he has identified the perfect script, a director whose vision he shares, and a producer who will back it, Khan surrenders himself to the moment. There's no spillover, no hangover. Everything apart from the movie goes into soft focus. "When I read a script, it just goes straight to my brain," he says. "It's like a computer in its memory. It just soaks everything in and then it's in my head at all times," he adds, even as he acts out the first part he got in a play in Class XII. It was a line as a painter in a Gujarati play, a role he couldn't actually perform because he was sacked for missing a day of rehearsals. The line remains etched in his hard drive. He repeats it now: "Bloody hell, no one marries me. I wish his mother gets married to a dog."
On the sets, Khan is a trooper. He will hang out even when he doesn't have lines, or just play Scrabble with the assistants. He will promote the film across the country on every media he can find. And he will just not want to go home. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, who directed him in Rang De Basanti, and has been a friend since, says, "He makes himself completely accessible to the filmmaker." Kunal Kohli, who directed him in Fanaa, recalls how Khan was apologetic even asking him for four days off in the middle of the shoot in Mumbai in 2005 because he wanted to get married to Kiran Rao, a highly rated assistant director whose debut feature Dhobi Ghat will release this year. "He's there whether it is for readings or costume trials," adds Kohli. "And he's just incredibly intelligent. How many people do you know who can solve the Rubik's cube with one hand?"
Khan calls this quality "obsessive" and regrets that he cannot spend more time with his children, Junaid, 16, and Ira, 11, when he is acting in a film. His cousin, Nuzhat Hussain, a psychoanalyst, who lives in the building next door, has been close to him since he was 10 and she 15. She says the level of professionalism in his work where each person is given due respect is reflected in his personal life as well, where he is fastidious about his honesty. He simply cannot tell a lie. "But he is not superhuman. He does make mistakes. He hurts himself. But he is totally open to learning and feeling new things, which I think is an act of courage," says Hussain. Khan does have self-doubts. Personally, yes, and also professionally. But he refuses to compromise on his films. He says he learnt that lesson early on when he signed a spate of films in a hurry on the basis of their scripts and then realised the director's vision was completely different from his. He recalls that when he was at his lowest point, having been dismissed as a one film wonder, it was Mahesh Bhatt who offered him a hand, discussing a script with him, which as luck would have it, he didn't like it.
"He was at the peak of his talent, having just done Saaransh, Arth and Naam and I didn't know how I could tell him I didn't like his script. So I bought time, came home and asked Reena. She told me to follow my heart. I did, telling Bhattsaab that I wanted to do instead was a remake of one of my favourite films, Roman Holiday, with Sridevi. He listened but then took out a screenplay of Frank Capra's 1934 film It Happened One Night. Six months later, we would do the film together as Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin." That's a lesson of following his happiness that he hasn't forgotten since then. It's taught him to do things his way, to go with his gut instinct even when every practical sense is screaming no, as it did when Mehra narrated Rang De Basanti to him, which was coming on the heels of four Bhagat Singh flops. And if he still needs advice, he turns to Hussain, who is producer Nasir Hussain's daughter, and actor Imran Khan's mother. "She's one person I go to when I need to talk about anything," he says warmly. "She's a great thinker."
Stardom sits simply on him. Yes, there are the six bodyguards who travel everywhere with him. His man Friday Sachin, his girl Friday Sarita, and his manager Binki seem to stay awake all night. There is also the flashy Toyota Landcruiser and the Rs 10-crore sprawling house in Panchgani. But Khan is essentially a middle-class man, who thinks nothing of upturning the Body Shop shower gel to catch the last drop or blindly trusting his accountant of 20 years to invest his money well. It's ingrained in him because his most formative years, eight to 14, were spent in the shadow of his father, producer Tahir Hussain's imminent bankruptcy.
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