Life has come a funny, full circle for Rasika Dugal. When she was promoting Mirzapur season one in 2018, she started filming for her improvised film Fairy Folk. During the film’s rune-up to release–it opened in cinemas last Friday–she was fielding questions about the release date of Mirzapur season three. Promotions lead monotony, Fairy Folk required novelty. She laughs at the duality.
“Imagine balancing these two situations,” she says, being perhaps in humble denial of her own merit as an artiste. Directed by Karan Gour, Fairy Folk pairs her up with her husband Mukul Chadda, an experienced improv actor. The film follows a genderless being, who forces itself into the life of a couple, “unleashing a whirlwind of wonder, and catastrophe – depending on who you ask.”
In an interview with Indianexpress.com, Rasika Dugal talks about making of the film, with a footage of over 3,000 minutes, which took two years to edit and why acting with her husband in a movie riding solely on spontaneity and not written dialogues was also a gamble.
Edited excerpts:
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What does it mean to work in an ‘improvised’ film?
It means there was a rough structure to every scene, but exactly what transpires within the scene was done between action and cut. There was no pre-planning. The dialogues are fresh, funny and have all those beautiful oddities of life, when you have one thought, abandon it midway, then come back to it. Often when we speak it’s illogical because of that, but sometimes in films the dialogues get cleaned too much, these oddities are removed. But Fairy Folk has that.
How does the screenplay of an improv film look like?
A regular screenplay is detailed, where the characters are entering, what they are saying. Here, every scene just had a four line description of what the director generally wants to achieve from this. It had absolutely no written dialogues. Mukul and I have worked with improvisers together. Improv doesn’t mean two people can do anything they want. It is an art which has to be practiced. It’s a sport where each game is different from the other, you can’t plan it but you have to practice it with your team. It also has rules that you have to follow.
What are these rules?
One of the basics you learn is ‘Yes, and?’ Which means that anything your co-actor brings to you in a scene, you’ve to accept it. So even if it’s something you weren’t expecting at all, you can’t say, ‘No, what are you saying?’ You’ve to accept and build on it. It’s much more difficult in practice than it sounds in theory.
Mukul had started doing improv much before I did so when he explained this to me, I thought it’s no big deal. More often than not, when you put two actors together who haven’t done improv before, the scene will always be argumentative. Because the first instinct when you put two actors together and people are watching them is to negate each other. Then that becomes a boring scene about two people saying no to each other. There’s no real conflict, just a superficial negation.
Improv is important for actors even if they don’t do an improv film. That’s why I used to go to improv comedy Mumbai, practice and workshop. A scene isn’t made just because one actor said a line well, that’s not how it works.
In the absence of dialogues, through which one can at least get their beats right, how do you gauge if you’ve given a good shot?
Whether scripted or improvised, it’s not my job to gauge if it’s a good shot or not. My job is to be present and it’s for the director to know if they’ve got it because they’re the ones seeing it from the outside and in a larger context of the film.
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Does it affect the performance at any level?
I had a great time shooting for the film because I was working with actors who know how to improvise. If they didn’t, it would’ve been tough. Like playing volleyball with a team who don’t know how to play the sport. All of these actors are better at improv than me and have done it longer than I have.
Did having Mukul your husband as a co-actor help? Does the improv get better with someone you know intimately?
It’s a tough one to answer because sometimes I feel familiarity works for on screen relationships and sometimes I feel the opposite. You already have an existing dynamic in a relationship and if a different dynamic is required between the same two people on screen then you’ve to undo something and make something a new. Here it definitely helped that we are familiar with each other, that we have a very practiced working rhythm. Whether it’s at home or improv. But I want to believe that we are skilled enough actors, even if we weren’t married to each other we would be able to pull this off as well.
Are there retakes in an improv film and what is the homework like, since there are no lines to memorise….
Not at all, it would kill the magic, which lies in spontaneity and not rehearsal. We did improvised scenes that are not there in the film. For example, we improvised three scenes which take place before the first scene of the film, so that we could build a healthy history to work with. In fact, Karan would give me some information about my character, which Mukul would not be privy to and he would give him information that I wouldn’t know. Not in a way to trick the other actor, but how in life, we don’t have complete information when we meet another person.
And about retakes, the second take doesn’t look like the first one at all. Karan really followed through on his promise of an improv film because often directors can say they’re making an improv film but on set they can’t help but give direction! I could see Karan resisting and holding back, there were so many times I could see he was so tempted to say, ‘You have reached this beautiful point in the scene, why don’t we take it there.’ But he didn’t! I have to give full marks. If we did one take and were required to do another, he didn’t ask us to repeat the first take. He would say let’s start afresh, that is why he took two years! Poor thing sat and watched us do anything!
I was promoting Mirzapur 1 at the time we were shooting Fairy Folk! That’s how long ago we started the shoot. Imagine doing promotions–where you say the same thing over and over again–and then shooting for an improvised film, where you don’t do the same thing again!
Is there an improv answer you come up with every time people ask you when will Mirzapur 3 come or are you done answering that?
I am never done with it, always very happy! Secretly I am extremely happy that even though we have had gaps between seasons, our audience has loyally followed us and they still ask us questions about the show. Now that we are close to the season coming out, I am thrilled that this question is still being asked!
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