Amongst the most prominent scenes from Aamir Khan’s career is the one in Rang De Basanti where his character DJ breaks down upon realisation of the realities of the world following a life-changing tragedy that he experiences. The superstar, however, mentioned that he doesn’t consider his work in the sequence to be satisfactory and remarks how it could have been better.
While in conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India, the actor revealed that people often bring up the scene as one of his finest, but he has always felt otherwise.
He mentioned how when an actor works on an emotionally heavy and intense scene, timing is the most crucial factor. “When you are performing a scene like that, you have to be feeling just right, on the day," he said.
"Mehra was planning to do it in one single shot" Khan noted, describing Director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's vision for the scene. The actor spent the day rehearsing, carefully piecing together how his emotions had to flow.
“It was very important for me to be in the right frame of mind before I go “The next day when I reached the set, I noticed the costume was wrong. I told the AD and he informed me that we won’t be shooting that scene today.” noted Khan, explaining how the schedule had to be changed in order to utilise resources optimally and avoid extending the shoot by a day and a half.
By the time they returned to the scene three days later, Khan said the emotional rhythm he had built was gone.
“On that day, my emotion was full to the brim and it was ready to overflow. Three days later, I was not in that same frame of mind. Something misfired,” he said.
That, according Khan, is why the final scene never landed for him in the way it should have. “I was never able to do it the way I wanted to,” he said.
Conversely, he was satisfied with his performance in the climax of his 2014 film PK. There, he said, the performance came instinctively and stayed completely in sync with the need of the script because he was fully in the zone.
The lesson, he added, stayed with him long after the shoot. “Never be practical. There’s a magic in a moment,” he said, reflecting on what the experience taught him about instinct, timing and performance.
