Everything about film is real, says Tendulkar
to see you all from real life to reel life.” The audience, mostly made up of sports journalists at a theatre in Santacruz, were then in conversation with director James Erskine when Sachin Tendulkar walked in after a part of his biopic was screened. It came to an abrupt halt as Tendulkar took centrestage and shared his journey on his upcoming biopic — Sachin: A Billion Dreams.
Thirty-five minutes of the movie, scheduled to be released on May 26, was screened on Tuesday that mostly deals with the timeline of the biopic, starting from his childhood to getting noticed by his coach Ramakant Achrekar to his first international tour against Pakistan and all the way to winning the World Cup in 2011.
“This was a new experience for me. All my life I had been looking towards the next game and let people talk about my last innings. Here I had to speak regarding my past throughout,” Tendulkar said. Admitting that he was the most excited in the Tendulkar family to watch the movie, he said there was hardly anything he felt the movie does not portray about his journey. “They had 10,000 hours of footage and I really admire their skills because how do you make sense of something over 35 years and to squeeze that to two hours and 17 minutes… I said this is the first innings I’ve played, now you need to play the second innings,” he said.
“The film was shot in my house. It’s not a studio. So what you see, it’s my house in Bandra Sahitya Sahawas. You see Sachin and Ajit trying to teach me how to play and all that, it’s the actual ground where I grew up. So everything is as real as it can get. The only thing is that I can’t go back to being a five-year-old so that’s something we had to manage,” Tendulkar added.
He also took a walk down memory lane and spoke of Mark Mascarenhus, his former agent who died in a car crash, his father and a number of individuals who he believes had helped him shape his career. There’s a rare footage of the late Ramesh Tendulkar in the movie where he states: “I am proud of all my children. And about Sachin, everyone thinks him as their family member, which is an extremely proud feeling for me.”
There were a few funny ones as well, including his interaction with Tom Alter, an interview that has become famous over the years. “I remember this was immediately after I was invited to play in the India nets to bat against Kapil Dev and everyone. DIlip Vengsarkar had invited me and Tom had asked me ‘so how was it like facing Kapil Dev?’ And I had replied ‘he was also good’,” he said, as the audience burst into laughter.