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Filmmaker Shoojit Sircar opened up about casting Varun Dhawan in his 2018 drama film October, and said that even Varun doesn’t realise how ‘brilliant’ he was in the film. The casting the then-rising star came as a surprise to fans, who were becoming accustomed to Varun working in more mainstream films than the meditative October. In an interview on the Unfiltered by Samdish YouTube channel, Shoojit opened up about working with Varun, and the many tricks that he used to extract a believable performance out of him. He said that he only agreed to meet Varun in the first place was because the actor kept calling him up. Describing their first meeting, he said, “He would keep calling me, and I would wonder why he’s so persistent. I knew of him, but I had no intention of working with him. I had started casting for October, I’d also shortlisted several candidates. One day, I was supposed to fly to Kolkata, and I got a call from Varun in the morning. This must’ve been his fifth or sixth call to me. I told him if he wants to meet, he can come over to my office right away. He was taken aback, but he showed up.” Also read – October: Varun Dhawan’s finest hour, even after a decade in Bollywood Shoojit said that Varun was in a daze when he entered his office wearing pyjamas. “It was like he’d just woken up. He was clumsy. He walked in, but he was not sure what he was doing. Someone gave him water, he spilled it. He started cleaning up the mess. Someone gave him tea, and he spilled that as well. Then he sat on the floor. He was behaving very strangely, not making any sense at all. And in that odd behaviour, I saw Dan (protagonist of October). He was unsure of everything, but there was something in his eyes.” Shoojit said that shortly after the meeting, he told his key collaborators that Varun could be a good fit for Dan, because he could be moulded. Shoojit also opened up about working with Varun on set, and explained that he didn’t tell him the second half of the film. To get what he wanted out of him, Shoojit withheld giving Varun the full script, and allowed him to perform under false assumptions about how the story would end. Because Varun had assumed that there would be a happy ending, he played certain scenes differently to how he would’ve had he known what Shoojit had in store. The filmmaker let him. He continued, “I didn’t give him the script… He asked me why, and I told him, ‘If I give you the script, you’ll concoct your own story… He had no idea how the film would end, and was hoping that there was going to be a romance in the second half. He’d have a blank expression on his face, but blankness is exactly what I wanted! Even in the script of the first half that I’d given him, I edited out a few scenes.” Shoojit said that they filmed the second half first, and Varun proceeded to perform his scenes with the assumption that the character of Shiuli would regain her health after battling for her life in the hospital. “He didn’t know the script! He only realised what kind of film we were making much later, when we started working on the first half. In the scene where Dan goes to meet Shiuli for the first time in the hospital after a fall leaves her fighting for life, Shoojit didn’t allow him to see her beforehand. He told Varun to go with the flow, and at one point during the scene, Varun had no idea what to do and asked Shoojit for advice mid-take. But because he hadn’t seen co-star Banita Sandhu in full makeup, he was shocked. After the scene was over, he had tears in his eyes. “He’s a very good boy,” Shoojit said about the actor, who slashed his fee for October. The film under-performed at the box office. “You get terror phone calls,” Shoojit said about the days following the film’s release. He said that it made its money back through ancillary channels, but it didn’t live up to the expectations of something with Varun in it. The actor will soon be seen in the action film Baby John. Shoojit is gearing up for the release of his new film, I Want to Talk, starring Abhishek Bachchan . Click for more updates and latest Bollywood news along with Entertainment updates . Also get latest news and top headlines from India and around the world at The Indian Express . None
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