Madras Cafe doesn't get into a political or ethnic blame game - Siddhartha Basu

India’s favourite quiz master, Siddhartha Basu, is all set to make his silver screen debut as an actor with Madras Cafe. Also in his kitty is Bombay Velvet for which he is currently shooting in Colombo. Tellychakkar.com caught up with the 58-year old television producer, widely regarded as the father of Indian quiz shows, and quizzed him on his new role, that of an actor. Quiz master, producer (Big Synergy) and now an actor. That’s one more feather adorning your already crowded hat. How did acting happen? (Laughs) I don’t know about feathers, but God knows my crown is pretty bare of hair, the reason perhaps a couple of fine filmmakers have planted a hat on it. You’ll have to ask them why, but maybe they just needed a senior looking bloke who wasn’t too overexposed and who could look the part, and who they knew could act a bit from his theatre days, at least by reputation. Both calls, for Madras Cafe and Bombay Velvet, came completely out of the blue, unconnected with each other. So will films remain your main focus now? The reason I took up these films was because the roles sounded interesting and also Shoojit (Sircar) and Anurag (Kashyap) are people whose work I respect. I’ve just gone into them as one-off things, hardly as a conscious career shift. I’m enjoying it as a change, but Big Synergy and our productions remains my mainstay. Why did you choose Madras Cafe as your launch pad? Shoojit was sure he wanted me to do this role, and persistently brushed aside my reservations about doing it. He and I go back a long way, and apart from the personal association, I have enormous regard for his body of work. He’s a very intuitive filmmaker, with an innate grasp of film language, with which he spins out very real, earthy, yet eloquent cine statements. Even his ads, like the recent Binani one with Amitabh Bachchan, or the Gujarat tourism campaign, all bear his special stamp. I’ve had a privileged personal preview of Shoe Bite, an absolutely outstanding film, in which Big B is just brilliant, literally performing out of his skin, and which is tragically still lying in the cans. Shoojit has lived with the idea of Madras Cafe for a number of years, earlier as Jaffna, and has been determined to make it happen. Roping me in to do a part in which he saw was a fit, was just part of that determination. Talk us through your role in Madras Cafe as the head of RAW? The film is designed as a fast paced thriller, with a documentary edge, in which my role is of a power player, busy with backroom manoeuvres, which don’t always go your way. I play Robin Dutt, or RD, a top official in external intelligence, who deploys and runs Vikram Singh, the part played by John Abraham, for covert operation behind battle lines in the Sri Lankan Civil War, and then to try and to avert a terror strike at home. The backdrop is when the big Indian intervention happened, well intentioned, but doomed to fail. How did you prepare for your role? Did you meet any former RAW head to get some inputs? Since it was fiction, Shoojit didn’t want me to play an actual person, but fill out the role he had in mind, by playing it straight, simple and strong. I follow the director. The film is his vision, after all. Did your experience as a quiz master come handy while preparing for the role? In terms of just facing the camera, inevitably. But it’s different when you’re part of a scene, playing a role, especially for the big screen. So I was guided by Shoojit on how he wanted me to pitch it. But maybe he was counting on the sense of authority he thinks I project as a quizmaster. Don’t you feel Madras Café touches upon a very sensitive topic and could run into controversy? (Frowns)The film doesn’t get into a political or ethnic blame game. It’s about the human cost of the strife. I’m hoping everybody will see that, and there won’t be any needless controversy.