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Actor Naseeruddin Shah looked back on the time he was shooting Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro with director Kundan Shah, and confessed that he didn’t understand the tone that the filmmaker was aiming for. This made him an unpleasant person to be around on set, and he said in an interview that he later apologised to the director.
In a chat with Film Companion, the veteran actor said that back then, he thought of himself as a very serious actor, and found Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro to be ‘ludicrous’. While making it, he said, he gave the filmmaker ‘a lot of grief’.
He said, “I wasn’t nice to work with. Myself, I would’ve probably done something drastic to such an actor. Because that was the time I believed deeply in the Method, and the believability and the logic. And Kundan was out to make a Marx Brothers kind of movie. I hadn’t seen enough of the Marx Brothers then, so I found many of the situations in the film ludicrous. And I didn’t find anything funny while shooting that film, and maybe that is why it is so funny.”
He continued, “None of us were laughing at ourselves while performing it, whether it was Satish Shah, or Om, or Ravi Baswani or Satish Kaushik. It’s like fate has dealt a blow on part two of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. They’re all gone. So, yes, I gave Kundan a lot of grief, but I did apologise to him later when I saw the film. I realised I was mistaken and I was being unreasonable. I should’ve tried to get on his wavelength, instead of trying to get the film on mine.”
He said that he is normally very trusting of his directors, and that he depends on them greatly, but he felt that ‘Kundan was going wrong’. “I was mistaken. I don’t know why I felt that. I think it was because after movies like Albert Pinto, Manthan, Junoon and so on, but I was too much into logic, and emoting all the time. An actor’s only job isn’t to emote. It’s to communicate. And Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was a movie that wanted to get across a certain idea. It was not a comedy for the sake of making people laugh. It made people laugh, but also disturbed them,” he said.
Released in 1983, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro has cemented itself as a cult hit over the years. The film also starred Bhakti Barve, Pankaj Kapur and Neena Gupta.
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