After a gap of four years, Madhuri Dixit is back shooting for her next film. The actress is set to make her debut in Marathi cinema with Tejas Prabha Vijay Deoskar’s Bucket List and we spotted her shooting for the film recently riding a Harley Davidson Sportster 883. With her million dollar smile, she says that she is not into riding heavy bikes. “I can ride a scooty and those kind of lighter bikes but not the heavy ones. But we have a lot of shots with these bikes and it's fun.”
The actress also shared that she was shooting in the city for the first time. “Though I have shot in Loni for Prem Granth, it wasn’t considered to be a part of Pune back then.”
Ask her what about the script caught her fancy and urged her to make her Marathi film debut, and she says, “I thought that the character was fascinating and so was the growth of the character. It’s a slice of life kind of story where the woman discovers herself. Her journey was fabulous, sweet and entertaining. It’s a family oriented film.” She says that there were several elements in the character that she could connect with and therefore found the script just right for her.
The film marks Madhuri’s first association with Tejas too, who is known for films like Prem Sutra and Ajinkya. Ask the actress how’s the association been so far and she replies, “It’s been wonderful. He is a good director who has a clear vision. He has been able to put together on screen what he and I had visualised while reading the script,” she says, adding, “When I started working on this Marathi film, I was like, ‘Okay, the subject is Marathi and I speak in that language at home along with Hindi and English.’ In that sense, I was confident that I would be right but then I kept thinking whether I would get the pitch right and those kind of things. But everything went out of the window once I was on the set and started shooting. I also realised that I could think in Marathi which is great because you can do a lot of improvisation.” She says that she’s also got a lovely star cast. “All of them are fabulous actors, so they kept me on my toes. They are all from the stage (theatre) and do a lot of improvisations, so I have to too. It’s been lovely.”
It took a long time for Madhuri to step into the Marathi film industry although there were constant reports of her signing some film or the other. “Marathi filmmaking has evolved in the last few years, they are trying various subjects and I therefore thought it was the right time for me to do a film. They are making films of very high quality which are at par with any Hindi film. At the end of the day, content is king and that’s always been the case,” says she.
But is the experience of working in Marathi film any different from Bollywood? “I think pace is hectic. We do a lot of scenes in a day and all the actors are prepared on the set. The shot is taken quickly because everybody is ready to roll.”
The actress in her three-decade-long career has worked with both old and new-age filmmakers. She says that when it comes to young filmmakers, their style of working is more organised. “When I started doing films, it was not a very organised industry. We never got a bound script, dialogues were written on the set and we had to learn them immediately and enact the scenes with the same conviction. Today, everything is planned — from dialogues to scripts, our look to shooting locations. All these things make an actor’s job easy because all I have do then is come to the set, concentrate and do my job,” she says, adding that when actors get a bound script, they know the lines, and get to read the script several times before they come on set and this helps them start living the character before the shoot begins.
