Sushmita Sen found the perfect way to channelise her inner strength through her work in the Ram Madhvani directorial ‘Aarya’.
The title character of ‘Aarya’, much like Sushmita, is a woman of substance. She calls the shots, is highly adaptive, plays to her strengths and is protective
about her world.
As the second season of the crime thriller approaches its release, Sushmita spoke with IANS about her experience of working in Ram Madhvani’s 360 degree
set up, constructing Aarya’s character and her subsequent dissociation from the character for the downtime.
For her, working in a novel 360 degree system of Ram Madhvani where filming happens in real time, is “the most enriching system” and “the one that spoils an actor”. She says, “There’s no way you can go back to the discontinued way of emotions with multiple takes of
close up, over the shoulder, jimmy jib. The camera is a fly on the wall, you don’t feel the camera, it doesn’t interfere with the actors in real time.”
Explaining a normal shoot day on ‘Aarya’ sets, she adds, “Even if you drop a glass and it breaks during the take, you continue with the scene and find a way around to take the broken glass off the frame. So, you adapt. His school says, ‘please make mistakes, let real life hap-
pen while filming’. It’s like theatre.
All the actors are aware. This is a system ofawareness. He (Ram) has done an out-standing job with this system.” Shooting in such an immersive atmosphere, where multiple stimuli are at work both on the surface and at the subconscious level, the gravity of the
emotions can drag an actor into depths..
Laying down the framework of the character construction, the actress says, “We shoot ‘Aarya’ in a way where depending on the workshop, we get into a zone. We are not called by our real names but by
the names of the characters that we are playing, during the schedule.”
She continues, “We don’t keep big breaks between schedules, we do it from start to finish in order to maintain that psychology of characters and the universe.”