From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Our world is inherently chaotic, and we constantly strive to impose some structure on this chaos. Watching a play, a movie, or a TV show allows us to experience humanity through others, taking a break from our own responsibilities. In its best form, acting mirrors our lives, allowing us to see ourselves in the stories being told.
Despite every adversity, never give up on your dreams. I am living proof that having been born and brought up in the smallest country in the Southern Hemisphere, it is possible to fulfil your ambition and succeed despite seemingly insurmountable odds.
If you truly immerse yourself in a role, it's akin to spontaneously adopting an accent – suddenly, you find yourself expressing thoughts that seem to emerge from an unexplored facet of your personality. This latent potential has always existed within us.
To make a great movie, you cannot set out to make a great movie! Great films are authentic, they capture the zeitgeist of a time and place in an entertaining and engaging way. Great cinema becomes something that reflects the mood of the time.
The greatest film-makers have an ability to work beyond the genre. Kubrick, Scorsese and even the great Ford who made Westerns, but transcended them. There's something about the vision of these film-makers that can use the supporting framework of a genre but create something which appeals to a wider story and audience.
Romance and suspense are consistently the number 1 selling genres in the world, but don't forget even suspense can have romance – it's a huge genre. The part of the genre that has been ignored is female forward romance. Most of the decision-makers in film have been men, and that's now changing as more female filmmakers get out there.
Success and fame, especially fame, can instigate fundamental shifts within us at a cellular level. The very nature of fame is peculiar; it's akin to an insatiable flame that ceaselessly yearns for more, compelling you to endlessly seek something, despite its ultimate emptiness.
Cinema and drama are also changing perceptions in India. This certainly happened with Made in Heaven which was commercially entertaining, but had a main character who was Gay. It blew everyone away and started an important conversation which was really encouraging.
You don't pick an aesthetic in abstract – you need to have a core point, a core reason to make a film, and the form of aesthetic springs from that necessity. Everything has to relate to that core intention.
My training as an actor prepared me for caregiving. As actors, we show up ready to explore what might happen without a clear sense of the outcome. This requires you to be nimble, flexible, and curious, qualities I had to embrace daily as a caregiver.
We're tackling serious subjects like life, death, and existential questions, but in a lighthearted way. This approach makes heavy topics more approachable. There's a cultural instinct to revere those who have passed, as if they know something we don't. Yet, in our show, we flip this idea on its head.
Starting in theatre can work both ways. I've seen theatre actors who are too dramatic for film, because they have the tendency to want to reach-out to that last member of the audience. That said, theatre gives you this confidence to perform and for me, it gave me a kind of greed in terms of the kind of roles I was looking for.