Hindustan Times (Patna) - Hindustan Times (Patna) - Live
‘PEOPLEWANT DRAMA, NOTA DOCU’
Actor John Abraham talks about fighting corruption on the screen — but with hardcore entertainment
This is a packed year for actor John Abraham. “We’re shooting in a place near Rajkot. The shoot is shaping up very nice for RAW (Romeo, Akbar, Walter), but we still have two-three months to go,” he says, sounding tired yet alert, when we ask him what’s keeping him busy, apart from the fact that his next film, Satyameva Jayate, is up for release. He talks about being Bollywood’s underdog, always choosing the ‘wrong’ release dates, and the reality of living with corruption.
What attracts you to patriotic subjects so much? Just this year, you had Parmanu, and now Satyameva Jayate…
I’m attracted to scripts that’d entertain me as a viewer, and this one moved me, as much as it moved Manoj Bajpayee, my co-star. There’s always a fatigue factor when you’re kind of bringing in the patriotic [angle] all the time, but I think Satyameva Jayate is a hardcore commercial film. It talks about corruption, bribery, molestation — all of this in a commercial garb. People don’t want to see a documentary, they want to see dialogue-baazi, romance, drama, and interesting songs.
Did you do any research for your film — the corruption bit?
You don’t need to research anything about corruption! It’s just a matter of how you deal with it. I’ve experienced it myself, but when you have an honest family, your default setting is honesty. My father is the most honest man on this side of the planet. But how John Abraham addresses corruption in real life is very different from how he does it on-screen! (laughs) You don’t want to mess with him. Also, the idea is not how you address corruption, but just [to] acknowledge that it exists.
And after we acknowledge it?
If I tell you, ‘We need a corruption-free society’, you’d probably laugh and say, ‘This guy is an idiot’, because in fact it’s practically impossible [to achieve that]! But we need to make it [close to] possible by educating the new generation.
Satyameva Jayate is clashing with your good friend Akshay Kumar’s Gold (August 15). Is that playing on your mind?
No. People have their choices to make. On a day like August 15, there’s enough space for two [patriotic] films.
Also, neither Akshay nor me are the producers of our films; [the release date] is the producer’s decision, and both of us are happy with the date. Also, John Abraham is always known to come on the very, very wrong dates all the time.
Why do you say so?
Look at Parmanu. We released on the Friday on which the IPL semi-finals were taking place, and on the coming Sunday, there were the finals. We released one week before Veere Di Wedding, two weeks after a similar-genre film, Raazi, and had just five days to market the film. How wrong can you get? For a change, I’m releasing on a good date, so I deserve to be happy! (laughs).