Dr Chandraprakash Dwivedi remembers Irrfan’s early days in the film and TV industry

I was impressed with Irrfan’s role as Al Beruni in Shyam Benegal’s Bharat EkKhoj. He was just out of NSD and raring to go.  Infact his NSD batch-mate Ishaan Trivedi introduced me to him.  I cast him as Senapati of Nanda in my show Chanakya. Irrfan was a very hard-working actor and never complained ever to me. He would be on set before time with rehearsals and made my work much easier.

But one interesting anecdote from the show that I am sharing is that whenever I took a close up shot of him he would never be still.He had the habit of doing some movement or the other. And two takes were the same – one day he came up to me and told me Dr Saab itna close up mat lo aap toh hathoda maar ke khade kar dete ho.

I stopped taking his close up but if he was asked to give the shot that matches his previous he would surely honour and recreate the same scene – that is how he was as a person, passionate about his work and completely professional.

Sunny Deol asked me the same question about Irrfan’s habit – I told him just tell him to recreate the previous take and he will surely do it.

Irrfan was somebody who was crazy about improvisation right from the beginning of his career. Though there were occasions when we almost came to working together but unfortunately that didn’t happen. All I can say in the end was that Irrfan was a director’s delight

( The writer is a well-known TV and filmmaker and has films like Pinjar and Mohalla Assi to his credit. He is directing Akshay Kumar in Prithviraj)

(This is an excerpt from our special May issue on Rishi Kapoor and Irrfan Khan. Please click on this link  https://cineblitz.news/may_2020 to read more)

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