The SPIRIT of Anushka
In a marked departure from her Bollywood career so far, Anushka Sharma plays a friendly ghost in her second production venture Phillauri, that releases in the UAE tomorrow
Comedy comes out of the confusion. We did not make faces. She is not a scary ghost but a free spirit.” Anushka Sharma
ANUSHKA SHARMA HAS worked with dream directors like Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Imtiaz Ali, Zoya Akhtar, Raj Kumar Hirani, Anurag Kashyap etc. Not many actresses can boast of working with these sought-after directors on their resume. But her career-best performance came in with relatively smaller directors like Navdeep Singh for NH10 and Maneesh Sharma for
Band Baaja Baarat. No wonder for her own production house, she chooses to invest her money in fairly new directors.
Actresses often complain that hardly any roles are being written keeping female protagonists in mind. Anushka believes in the philosophy of not cribbing and taking matters into her own hands, so it’s no wonder that she started her own production house, Clean Slate Films with her brother. She is now ready with the second film from her production house,
Phillauri, that releases in the UAE tomorrow.
Anushka plays a friendly ghost in the movie. “We were very careful about not going overboard with expression and making it look caricaturish. She is a ghost but her personality is the same from what she was when she was alive. Shashi is a very simple and straightforward kind of a girl who is very rooted. We couldn’t have had a huge jump for comic relief. The comedy is actually coming from Suraj’s character and not mine. Because he is scared and in a mess and she is also as scared as he is because she cannot understand what is happening. It’s a comedy of errors. Comedy comes out of the confusion. We did not make faces. She is a not a scary ghost but a free spirit,” said Anushka while talking to select media in a video conference from Mumbai with her co-star Suraj Sharma.
Suraj Sharma is famously known for playing the lead role in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. Anushka was a bit apprehensive about whether he could speak Hindi but was pleasantly surprised when she heard his Delhi accent. “It’s a fun film. It’s got an emotional graph as well. There are lots of new elements you will discover in the film. Phillauri touches on multiple emotions – comedy, drama, romance. You explore the older and modern times and dilemmas of life. This film is like a wholesome meal,” said Suraj.
Anushka also made it very clear that the film is not influenced by Tim Burton’s Corpse
Bride. “I think I know what you are talking about. There was an article that came in the newspaper. When the trailer of a Bollywood film comes out, the first thing people do is compare it to an international film. It’s a process that every movie goes through. Since there is an element of a ghost, people are attaching it to Corpse Bride. There is absolutely no similarity. I have personally not watched the movie. The writer has and said that there is no similarity at all. This film is a fun film, unlike Tim Burton’s dark drama.”