Going Big with Kusha Kapila

Not every digital creator is able to make the transition to the big screen but Kusha Kapila is an exception. After interesting parts in series such as Masaba Masaba and movies such as Thank You for Coming, the digital creator with 3.7 million followers on Instagram finally plays a series lead in Disney+Hostar’s refreshing Life Hill Gayi. With Divyenndu playing her brother, she is a spoiled rich heiress who is directed by her grandfather to clean up and run a hotel in the hills. It is a competition with her brother and whoever wins inherits the hotel. Kapila says acting for the screen or streaming requires a depth to the character which she had to work on. She is determined to excel here as well and takes acting workshops to test her mettle. She did a workshop with Rachit Singh recently and has now joined The Actors Room where aspiring actors get to perform scenes. Kapila says, “For some time I’m just going to enjoy acting for what it is, for the discipline it brings to your life.” Kapila, a graduate of NIFT, is an intelligent woman who has mined her pain for laughs but like all good artists has kept some trauma or dysfunctionality to draw upon. “I think all of us are #sadgirls or #sadboys in an alternative life. You find your own coping mechanism and hope that 80 per cent stays with you,” she says. Having moved to Mumbai last year, she is now comfortable being called a Mumbai girl and has a good ecosystem of friends who gather around her in times of joy and sorrow. Being in the public eye for a young woman is not easy, with everyone considering her personal life to be fair game, but Kapila bears it with a hard-earned sunny spirit. “There is glory in short form content, but it will be great to be in films or series which are remembered for long,” she says. By 2025, she would like to have produced a short film and a series with her friend Srishti Dixit and be part of some “cool content which is not groundbreaking but makes people happy”.

Southern Comfort

Daniel Caltagirone did not want to play a typical British villain when Pa. Ranjith narrated the story of Thangalaan to him. Based in pre- Independence India, the film is a mix of realism and fantasy, with Caltagirone and Vikram playing two sides of the same coin, men in search of gold, regardless of how it affects them morally and socially. Caltagirone spent a year filming Thangalaan in Chennai and the Kolar Gold Fields and says he made friends for life with Parvathy Thiruvothu, Vikram and Malavika Mohanan. “We would constantly be in each other’s trailers talking, eating, when we were not shooting,” he says. It was a far cry from some sets he has been in the past, he says. He talks of a time when actors were told not to look the star in the eye. Or a time when another star got sushi flown into a remote location because he wanted to eat Japanese food. Or yet another time when the agents of two stars got into an argument about who had the bigger trailer, which led to the two trailers being measured. And we thought our stars were spoilt.

Rewind

Do you remember when the hero would sit at the piano, pretend to play, and sing songs of heartbreak and betrayal? Sunil Dutt singing ‘Chalo ek baar phir se’ in Gumrah (1963) or Raj Kapoor singing ‘Dost dost na raha’ in Sangam (1964)? The piano vanished in the ’70s and ’80s, only to return intermittently, usually with a twist of irony in movies such as Yes Boss (1997) and Andhadhun (2018). I asked music scholar Akshay Manwani why it happened and he thinks the piano was a wealth signifier in the absence of other obvious symbols of being rich, like foreign mansions and private planes in movies from the 21st century. But also, he says, “The songs themselves have gone out of our cinema. More specifically, new age filmmakers in an attempt to cater to some notion of ‘realism’ are eliminating the performance within a performance song”. For instance, he says, Shammi Kapoor singing ‘Tumne mujhe dekha’ in Teesri Manzil (1966) or Dev Anand crooning ‘Khwaab ho tum ya koi haqeeqat’ in Teen Deviyan (1965), are instances of an audience within the film being watched by an audience outside the film. “New-age filmmakers (barring a few) are embarrassed to picturise such sequences anymore, grappling as they are with the ‘Aisa kahaan hota hai?’ syndrome. That is why songs in general and the piano songs, which are instances of a performance within a performance, have declined,” Manwani adds. Pity, isn’t it?

Akshay ManwaniBollywoodcinemaDaniel CaltagironeKusha Kapila