‘Ranbir Kapoor is more interested in his fans than they are in him, asks them what they had for breakfast’: Imtiaz Ali

Also read – Imtiaz Ali spent nights in the ‘darkest corners’ of Madhubala’s supposedly haunted bungalow, waiting for her ghost to come: ‘I remember the feeling’

He continued, “Good actors have empathy, but they’ve got the kind of aura where they can also be seen and recognised easily; people can be empathetic towards them… Everybody has a human body, everybody has a psychology… The biggest blessing that anybody can have is to be interested in other people. I have always observed this quality in good actors. Just look how interested Ranbir Kapoor is in people. He is more interested in his fans than they are in him. He asks them, ‘Aap kahan se aa rahe ho, aapne bus pakdi thi, subha kya khaya tha (Where are you coming from, did you take the bus, what did you have for breakfast)?’ These are the boring questions that he asks people.”

Imtiaz said that fortunately, he hasn’t worked with too many ‘bad actors’ in his career, but admitted that he has dealt with ‘stiff actors’ who were nervous for some reason or the other. He agreed that bad acting is ‘an outcome of bad direction’, and explained, “It proves that the filmmaker didn’t convey their vision to them properly. See, the buck always stops with the director. A casting director can suggest a name, but the director approves it. If they’re such a bad actor, why did you select them? But sometimes, what happens is that you don’t figure out the correct way to communicate with an actor. Simply giving them instructions isn’t the same thing as communicating with them.”

Imtiaz recently directed the acclaimed Netflix film Amar Singh Chamkila, starring Diljit Dosanjh and Parineeti Chopra. Ranbir, on the other hand, starred in the controversial Animal, the most successful film of his career as a leading man.