Sonali Bendre on ‘Sarfarosh’: At times we felt we were making a documentary

Sonali Bendre. Pic/Yogen Shah

Actress Sonali Bendre, who is receiving a lot of positive responses to the second season of the streaming show ‘The Broken News', is one of the actresses from Hindi cinema to have explored different film industries of India.

While she worked across Tamil, Marathi, Kannada and Telugu cinema, the actress said that for her, language was a big challenge while working in those film industries, and she wished that she was a little more conversant with the film teams back then.

The actress recently spoke with the IANS and discussed her new show being a part of ‘pan-India' films before the term came into being, and her cult-classic ‘Sarfarosh' which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary in Mumbai with a special screening.

Reflecting on her experience of working across the film industries of India, the actress told IANS: "We didn't say pan-India in the 1990s, we just did different cinema from across states. I have done one film in Marathi cinema, ‘Anahat'. It was a fabulous story. I have done a wonderful Tamil film, it was a love story on the Internet, the time when people used to visit cyber cafes. I have Kannada films as well and of course, Telugu films. Out of all, I enjoyed working in Telugu cinema and I did more of it. They're very gentle people."

Although the actress feels that the fun part of the similarity between different film sets of different industries is that it's a film set, she does feel that if the language barrier wasn't there, things would have been more dynamic for her as an artiste while working on films in different languages.

"The creativity, the feeling of satisfaction after a day of good work, is the same across the film sets. The only difference, I feel, is that of the language. Unfortunately, I didn't know all the languages and couldn't be very conversant with the people on the sets of those films. I knew the meaning of the words but I wasn't very comfortable in speaking the language seamlessly with confidence. So, it was 4 times the work compared to Hindi cinema for me," Sonali Bendre said.

'Sarfarosh', which saw her opposite Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan, emerged as the game-changer in Hindi cinema. It broke the clutter owing to its excellence in all departments of filmmaking with the riveting screenplay and its perfect casting.

Talking about her fondest memories of the film, the actress shared that there were times when she felt like, "Are we shooting a documentary?" but, it was her character in the film that made her believe that it was an all-out commercial film.

She said: "‘Sarfarosh' is a very special film, more so because of the director John Matthew Matthan. I and John had worked extensively in ad films. There were times when we felt like, ‘Are we making a documentary or what?'. But, it was the music and the dynamics between my and Aamir Khan's characters in the film that cemented our belief that we are making a commercial Bollywood film."

She said that Aamir, as we all know, is a perfectionist and it was such a great experience sharing the screen with him, and she learnt much more about the world of films through ‘Sarfarosh'.

"At a time when Hindi films were just about getting it right in the face of logistics and time constraints, ‘Sarfarosh' stands as a film that changed the course of cinema in terms of how films are made and the stories are told on the celluloid," she added.

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