Actor has to follow the director, says Amitabh Bachchan

If you are a true artiste, you follow your director.

This bon-mot comes from no less than Amitabh Bachchan, perhaps the biggest superstar in the history of Bollywood.

"An actor, as a true artiste, has to follow the director," Bachchan said in a freewheeling discussion of his art with his fans at a function organised by Enlighten Film Club here.

He regaled the audience while talking about two of his directors who could be said to be poles apart in terms of style and genre: Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Manmohan Desai. 

When Bachchan was about to shoot the climax of Mukherjee-directed `Anand', where the title character played by Rajesh Khanna dies, he started preparing for the sequence two days in advance, pondering emotions surrounding death,  loss of near and dear ones, etc.

"After two days, when I went to the set and shooting began, I blurted out everything within me, all that emotion, into the scene."

But Mukherjee wasn't impressed. "Hey, don't overdo it. You are doing it too much. (`Itna Nahi Karneka'). Don't get so  excited," he told Bachchan, ordering another take.

Mukherjee was "conservative" in use of sets and costumes, Bachchan said. "He would use only essential furniture."

"When we asked him "Dada, what about my costume for this scene?", he would just say: oh, this is OK, what you are wearing now will do".

"So we would shoot in the same dress which we had put on for going to the shoot," Bachchan said. "Then in the third film with him I decided that I would wear to the shooting what I wanted to wear (in the film)."

Mukherjee was a very good editor, and this gave him an advantage as a film-maker, he added.

After doing memorable films such as "Anand", "Abhiman" and "Chupke-Chupke" with Hrishida, Bachchan worked with Manmohan Desai. Talking about his style of functioning, he
said,"He (Desai) would first design the `items' that he wanted
in the film...Then he would shoot them and then write the
(screenplay) to link them up."

"Manmohan Desai did some of the craziest stuff, ridiculous stuff... but it always worked," Bachchan said. 

Talking about the famous `blood donation' scene (where three sons of a mother give her blood at once) in Amar Akbar Anthony, Bachchan said, "It was a medical disaster. Where in the world you have three people lying in the same room giving transfusion from one bottle?"

"It was a medical impossibility. But Desai did it, and it worked...When it (scene) opened, there was unbelievable
applause in the theatre."

Bachchan also paid tribute to late music director S D Burman, who composed score for the music-centric `Abhiman'. "I and Hrishida would go to Burman's house in Bandra...The tunes he sang to us...what you hear in the film is not even 25% of that", Bachchan said.