00:00I arranged for the fees from a friend. I got monthly allowances from my ex-girlfriend.
00:09I had the entire plan hatched and I just ran away from home.
00:16Hi, I'm Vijay Verma for Brute.
00:23My father, although he doesn't really know English too well, but he only preferred watching
00:30English films. He had this thing that he would take us to movie halls, to theatres to make
00:37us watch all Indira Jones, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Van Damme, all these actioners.
00:47He used to enjoy watching them. He never once took me to watch any Bollywood film. He actually
00:54didn't like Bollywood films. So Bollywood films were something that my mom and my sister
00:59were into. But I wasn't into it. I liked what my father was showing me.
01:08I was a very peaceful rebel. Almost like a saintly approach to rebellion. Because everything
01:20was given to me the way I wanted it. Even my father was like, don't point wasting your
01:28time going to college. Education is not for us, we are businessmen. He had that saying
01:37that a job is a job. Until I failed at several jobs, and then I finally decided I want to
01:44do it, it's going to be a no from him. Because every time anybody says in a set up which
01:51doesn't understand cinema or movie making or films or actors, they'll be like, two Salman
01:56Khanpuri bansakta hai. So of course that happened and he said the same thing. But then
02:05I think I was a very meticulous rebel. I got myself a seat at a very good film school in
02:12India, FTII Pune. I arranged for the fees from a friend. I got monthly allowances from
02:20my ex-girlfriend. I had the entire plan hatched and then I just ran away from it. It was a very
02:27well planned elope or escape. So my father was the main threat to that plan. So we kept him in
02:40the dark. And my mom and my sister and my brother and everybody knew, including 30 people who came
02:46to see me off at the railway station. I made that one phone call before I realized that I'm
02:50going for one year only. And he said, you better leave before I see your face. So I'm like, yay!
02:57I realized that acting that I thought is the job that I want to do is something completely
03:08different than the one that I imagined it to be. In my theatre school, the first couple of months,
03:14they just made me clean the floor, do duck walks, sit in silence, meditate. No dialogue, nothing.
03:24So I figured that this is a lot of work. It's not like you go in front of the camera and somebody
03:30blows air at you and your hair flies and you look pretty. You say a dialogue. The illusion of the
03:36work was different than the reality. When I came to Bombay, I was ready as an actor to a certain
03:42degree. But I wasn't ready for Bombay because it's just like, you could really like spend four
03:49days doing nothing in a film institute. But you can't spend one evening in Bombay without being
03:54a little bit productive. So that threw me off, like I need to work. And then the pursuit of work started.
04:00I didn't take it too well. I felt like, you don't know where I went, I fit, you know. So it was just like, I must be fitting some place.
04:16Like, I go to this audition, they say, you're not fit. Then another place, they say, you're not fit. I'm like, and then I started asking them why.
04:24And they're like, you're looking younger, you're looking older for the part. I'm like, you're looking not this for the part, not that for the part.
04:30After a month of doing that, going through that audition, I just decided I won't test auditions, I won't do auditions anymore.
04:37So I started doing theatre in Bombay. I worked with Mr. Tom Walter for close to a year and a half.
04:44First time I did an English play, I learned English from the beginning. I didn't get anything, no money, nothing.
04:53I still used to get support from family. I was just happy that I don't have to go through the ordeal of being rejected every other day.
05:09I got called by the casting agent and they said, we want to test you for a part. And I was at that stage in life when I was the lowest.
05:17Because I was waiting for one of my early films to come out and I had to wait for years before it came out.
05:24And it came and went without a trace. And I did a film in South and that became a huge hit but I was really badly written off by the critics in South.
05:35So I was at the lowest low when this casting call came and I went and I did it.
05:41And in a month's time I had the part. I went through another round with Zoya where she recorded me and then things started to fall in place.
05:54There were several very minor changes that affected me. Not just professionally but gave me a certain kind of confidence, a certain kind of idea about who I am and what I am capable of.
06:17So those were very personal achievements I felt.
06:20You see Mohin coming to the market and saying, wow, wow, what a, what a, wow, what a, what a, wow, wow, what a, what a, what a, what a.
