Posted:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/movies/15kuma.html?_r=1&ref=movies
Actor of the New India Chasing Raw Ambitions
Sheena Sippy/Warner Brothers Pictures
Akshay Kumar in his latest film, "Chandni Chowk to China." He is one of India's most prolific and best-paid actors.
SIGN IN TO E-MAIL OR SAVE THIS
PRINT
SHARE
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: January 14, 2009
MUMBAI — Akshay Kumar, India's superstar Everyman, is coming to America.
Related
Trailers & Clips: 'Chandni Chowk to China'
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
The actor Akshay Kumar on a visit to New York last week.
His latest film, "Chandni Chowk to China," is part kung fu bildungsroman, part Bollywood spectacle, and as much a New India fable of ambition and pluck as it is an allegory of Mr. Kumar's own assiduous rise to stardom. It's also the widest release of an Indian movie in North America, according to its American backer, Warner Brothers, opening Friday in 130 theaters across the United States and Canada.
In the lavishly produced film, which cost roughly $15 million, Mr. Kumar plays a bumbling bread maker from the ratty bylanes of Delhi who, by dint of grit and ingenuity, ends up slaying a Chinese villain. It cleverly brands Mr. Kumar's own improbable story, as the Indian commoner born with big dreams but no silver spoon. Like the character he plays, Mr. Kumar slogged for nearly 20 years through more than 100 pictures, mostly pulp action and horror movies. His popularity with working-class young Indians steadily grew, and soon Mr. Kumar was fetching a variety of leading roles, along with brand endorsements and last year his own reality television show, modeled after "Fear Factor."
He has had five major commercial successes in the last two years — the biggest was the goofy caper "Singh Is Kinng," which broke Indian box-office records last fall by taking in roughly $16 million on its opening weekend. Churning out three, sometimes four, films a year, Mr. Kumar, 41, his stubble visibly gray, has become one of the most prolific and best-paid actors in India.
If a generation ago Amitabh Bachchan captured the spirit of this country with his emblematic portraits of the angry young man, Mr. Kumar, a trained martial artist and India's most famous stuntman, seems to have tapped into the New India of raw, unbridled ambition.
He has branded himself an outsider in a notoriously closed and cut-throat industry. He does not speak English with a plummy accent. He does not seek to impress film critics. Instead he leaps out of planes, kicks and karate chops, hams it up on screen and draws audiences from across India's vast social and linguistic divides. In many ways he manages to resurrect the classic underdog hero of Indian cinema — except this time with six-pack abs.
"He has a rawness," said Rohan Sippy, one of the film's producers. "He can pitch it in a comic or dramatic way. It is high octane. He knows exactly what the audience wants. He is that audience."
On a Saturday morning last month in the sprawling Bollywood studio complex known as Film City, Mr. Kumar sat in the driver's seat of a black Honda CR-V, the stereo at full blast, listening to himself rhyme the closing track to "Chandni Chowk."
The lyrics were in Hindi, a brash hip-hop paean to ambition and individualism. "I came to a new world, left my own world behind," the song goes. "And when no path suited me, I made my own path."
The rhymes were composed by Bohemia, a Pakistani-American rapper from Oakland, Calif., and substantially retooled by Mr. Kumar. Mr. Sippy goaded him into singing it himself, which wasn't difficult. Mr. Kumar admires rappers. "Their music has an attitude," Mr. Kumar said. "I am what I am, take it or leave it."
And the lyrics of this song in particular resonated with him. "This is my story," he said. "Whatever I did, I did on my own terms, without following anyone else's dotted line."
Mr. Kumar was born in the heaving 16th-century enclave of Delhi called Chandni Chowk, to an amateur-wrestler-turned-accountant father who indulged his son's love of sport and cinema. Almost every weekend, he recalled, the family trooped off to see a movie in Bombay, where they moved when he was a young boy. Life changed forever when Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon" opened in theaters here. Mr. Kumar was 8. "He meant everything," Mr. Kumar recalled. "Strength, power, discipline."
He persuaded his father to send him to karate classes and then, after high school, to Bangkok, to train in martial arts. His father borrowed money. Mr. Kumar waited tables to earn his keep in Thailand.
He got his first break in the movies when a well-connected makeup artist ferried his photograph to a director looking for a fresh face. Mr. Kumar, loyal and superstitious, still employs that makeup artist, Narender Singh, who doubles as his ayurvedic doctor.
Midmorning, Mr. Kumar was inside a hulking, hot Film City studio, doing a retake of a short scene in which his character, the luckless Sidhu, has inadvertently killed a bad guy and found his cellphone laying on the ground. In this scene Sidhu fumbles and drops the cellphone. "Cut," yells Nikhil Advani, the director, thinking that Mr. Kumar has dropped it by mistake. But it is no mistake. This is how Mr. Kumar wants to play it. And Mr. Advani quickly realizes why: The more bumpkinlike he is in the beginning, the more spectacular his redemption will be at the end. "He pushes it to the edge," Mr. Advani says later. "He is not afraid."
Judging by his manic schedule on the set today, Mr. Kumar is also not content.
By lunchtime, in between shots, Mr. Kumar has held three meetings inside his trailer. He squeezes in an interview while getting a shave. A show producer waits for a chance to have a private session. Mr. Kumar's astrologer, Mukesh Gupta, stops by in the afternoon, for what, neither the stargazer nor his client will reveal. Mr. Kumar admits to being in a rush. He is keenly aware of how long it has taken to get into this charmed circle. He will not squander it. "I am greedy," he says. "I still don't feel like I am really part of this industry."
Mr. Kumar has a reputation for being a teetotaler and an early riser who works out in the parkour gym that he built on the grounds of one of his properties in a northern Mumbai suburb. "He is the hardest-working man in show business," Mr. Sippy said. "He is our James Brown."
Whether this film's cocktail of kitsch, song and sentimentality will lure new American audiences is unclear. But given the growing Indian-American population and the film's modest (by Hollywood standards) budget, it's not that big of a gamble. Last year's historical epic, "Jodhaa Akbar," opened in 100 theaters and took in about $16 million on its opening weekend in the United States alone.
And films like "Chandni Chowk" give Warner Brothers and the other Hollywood studios a chance to tap the prospering movie business of India, where they reap barely five percent of the revenue. Warner Brothers, which will also open the movie on more than 950 screens in India on Friday, plans to make at least five local-language films in India this year, and other studios like Sony are investing in the market too. Richard Fox, vice president of Warner Brothers International, called it an "intelligent market-entry approach."
"Our films don't carry passports," Mr. Fox said by telephone from Burbank, Calif. "It doesn't have to say 'Made in the United States.' "
Actor of the New India Chasing Raw Ambitions
Sheena Sippy/Warner Brothers Pictures
Akshay Kumar in his latest film, "Chandni Chowk to China." He is one of India's most prolific and best-paid actors.
SIGN IN TO E-MAIL OR SAVE THIS
SHARE
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: January 14, 2009
MUMBAI — Akshay Kumar, India's superstar Everyman, is coming to America.
Related
Trailers & Clips: 'Chandni Chowk to China'
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
The actor Akshay Kumar on a visit to New York last week.
His latest film, "Chandni Chowk to China," is part kung fu bildungsroman, part Bollywood spectacle, and as much a New India fable of ambition and pluck as it is an allegory of Mr. Kumar's own assiduous rise to stardom. It's also the widest release of an Indian movie in North America, according to its American backer, Warner Brothers, opening Friday in 130 theaters across the United States and Canada.
In the lavishly produced film, which cost roughly $15 million, Mr. Kumar plays a bumbling bread maker from the ratty bylanes of Delhi who, by dint of grit and ingenuity, ends up slaying a Chinese villain. It cleverly brands Mr. Kumar's own improbable story, as the Indian commoner born with big dreams but no silver spoon. Like the character he plays, Mr. Kumar slogged for nearly 20 years through more than 100 pictures, mostly pulp action and horror movies. His popularity with working-class young Indians steadily grew, and soon Mr. Kumar was fetching a variety of leading roles, along with brand endorsements and last year his own reality television show, modeled after "Fear Factor."
He has had five major commercial successes in the last two years — the biggest was the goofy caper "Singh Is Kinng," which broke Indian box-office records last fall by taking in roughly $16 million on its opening weekend. Churning out three, sometimes four, films a year, Mr. Kumar, 41, his stubble visibly gray, has become one of the most prolific and best-paid actors in India.
If a generation ago Amitabh Bachchan captured the spirit of this country with his emblematic portraits of the angry young man, Mr. Kumar, a trained martial artist and India's most famous stuntman, seems to have tapped into the New India of raw, unbridled ambition.
He has branded himself an outsider in a notoriously closed and cut-throat industry. He does not speak English with a plummy accent. He does not seek to impress film critics. Instead he leaps out of planes, kicks and karate chops, hams it up on screen and draws audiences from across India's vast social and linguistic divides. In many ways he manages to resurrect the classic underdog hero of Indian cinema — except this time with six-pack abs.
"He has a rawness," said Rohan Sippy, one of the film's producers. "He can pitch it in a comic or dramatic way. It is high octane. He knows exactly what the audience wants. He is that audience."
On a Saturday morning last month in the sprawling Bollywood studio complex known as Film City, Mr. Kumar sat in the driver's seat of a black Honda CR-V, the stereo at full blast, listening to himself rhyme the closing track to "Chandni Chowk."
The lyrics were in Hindi, a brash hip-hop paean to ambition and individualism. "I came to a new world, left my own world behind," the song goes. "And when no path suited me, I made my own path."
The rhymes were composed by Bohemia, a Pakistani-American rapper from Oakland, Calif., and substantially retooled by Mr. Kumar. Mr. Sippy goaded him into singing it himself, which wasn't difficult. Mr. Kumar admires rappers. "Their music has an attitude," Mr. Kumar said. "I am what I am, take it or leave it."
And the lyrics of this song in particular resonated with him. "This is my story," he said. "Whatever I did, I did on my own terms, without following anyone else's dotted line."
Mr. Kumar was born in the heaving 16th-century enclave of Delhi called Chandni Chowk, to an amateur-wrestler-turned-accountant father who indulged his son's love of sport and cinema. Almost every weekend, he recalled, the family trooped off to see a movie in Bombay, where they moved when he was a young boy. Life changed forever when Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon" opened in theaters here. Mr. Kumar was 8. "He meant everything," Mr. Kumar recalled. "Strength, power, discipline."
He persuaded his father to send him to karate classes and then, after high school, to Bangkok, to train in martial arts. His father borrowed money. Mr. Kumar waited tables to earn his keep in Thailand.
He got his first break in the movies when a well-connected makeup artist ferried his photograph to a director looking for a fresh face. Mr. Kumar, loyal and superstitious, still employs that makeup artist, Narender Singh, who doubles as his ayurvedic doctor.
Midmorning, Mr. Kumar was inside a hulking, hot Film City studio, doing a retake of a short scene in which his character, the luckless Sidhu, has inadvertently killed a bad guy and found his cellphone laying on the ground. In this scene Sidhu fumbles and drops the cellphone. "Cut," yells Nikhil Advani, the director, thinking that Mr. Kumar has dropped it by mistake. But it is no mistake. This is how Mr. Kumar wants to play it. And Mr. Advani quickly realizes why: The more bumpkinlike he is in the beginning, the more spectacular his redemption will be at the end. "He pushes it to the edge," Mr. Advani says later. "He is not afraid."
Judging by his manic schedule on the set today, Mr. Kumar is also not content.
By lunchtime, in between shots, Mr. Kumar has held three meetings inside his trailer. He squeezes in an interview while getting a shave. A show producer waits for a chance to have a private session. Mr. Kumar's astrologer, Mukesh Gupta, stops by in the afternoon, for what, neither the stargazer nor his client will reveal. Mr. Kumar admits to being in a rush. He is keenly aware of how long it has taken to get into this charmed circle. He will not squander it. "I am greedy," he says. "I still don't feel like I am really part of this industry."
Mr. Kumar has a reputation for being a teetotaler and an early riser who works out in the parkour gym that he built on the grounds of one of his properties in a northern Mumbai suburb. "He is the hardest-working man in show business," Mr. Sippy said. "He is our James Brown."
Whether this film's cocktail of kitsch, song and sentimentality will lure new American audiences is unclear. But given the growing Indian-American population and the film's modest (by Hollywood standards) budget, it's not that big of a gamble. Last year's historical epic, "Jodhaa Akbar," opened in 100 theaters and took in about $16 million on its opening weekend in the United States alone.
And films like "Chandni Chowk" give Warner Brothers and the other Hollywood studios a chance to tap the prospering movie business of India, where they reap barely five percent of the revenue. Warner Brothers, which will also open the movie on more than 950 screens in India on Friday, plans to make at least five local-language films in India this year, and other studios like Sony are investing in the market too. Richard Fox, vice president of Warner Brothers International, called it an "intelligent market-entry approach."
"Our films don't carry passports," Mr. Fox said by telephone from Burbank, Calif. "It doesn't have to say 'Made in the United States.' "
Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai
Cryptocurrency
Anupamaa
Cricket
Bigg Boss 19
5