Bas Ek Pal is about urban relationships

Courtesy: IndiaFM

Friday, September 01, 2006

After being a part of Onir's award winning and internationally acclaimed film, My Brother Nikhil, Juhi Chawla is back to working with Onir in his second film, Bas Ek Pal.

Is Bas Ek Pal beautiful?
Bas Ek Bal is very interesting. It's an intense film. An emotional thriller and I think it keeps surprising you.

The preview says the film is about "urban relationships". What exactly do you mean by urban relationships?

Yeh urban relationship kya hota hai, even I don't understand, but I would just put this that Bas Ek Pal is about one incident, five people involved and how it affects their life, changes their life, changes relations between them. The urban part that I understand is that all the characters belong to the city. They are all modern people, today's kind.

So is the incident that you are talking about, the Jessica Lal murder case?
Aaila!!! Achha? Really?? Now that you said it, there is just a touch of a similarity but nothing more. Nothing beyond that. It's not inspired by any such thing.

Your character is that of a former Miss. India who ends up marrying a wrong man and now spends time working for an orphanage. So how easy or difficult was it to get into the skin of this character?
So Onir seems to have told you a lot about my character. You are asking me nice clinical questions. (laughs) Yes, my character is of a former Miss India. She has given up her work to marry this person but things have not gone quite right between them. And yes, some of the time she works but in an old age home. I'm glad you know only the basic part. The scenes will still surprise you. So this is the base line of my character in the film. What was not easy about this film was its shot in present as well as flashback of the past and like I told you, the incident that happens changes every character's life. So some of the past scenes reflect in the present and when I am doing the present scenes I had to be reminded that what has happened and how my attitude has to be. So that thought had to be there while performing.

Onir loves working with you.
I like working with Onir. He is a good director.

You worked for the first time with Urmila in this film. How has the experience been?
Yes but we hardly shot for one scene together. The total shot time with Urmila was hardly 2-3 hours out of which half an hour is all that we chatted. So that's all I really got to know of her.

So was there any sense of competition with her or the other co-stars with regards to comparison?
There can never be any room for competition between me, Sanjay and Jimmy. As far as Urmila, what competition should we get into? There should be screen space together for competition. We are hardly there in a scene together (laughs). But seriously there is no room for competition between us.

Tell us about the music of the film
Music is very nice. My favorite song is Zindagi hosh mein hai, Hosh mein hai zindagi.

Each character in Bas Ek Pal has a colour code. What exactly is that all about? What's the concept behind that?
Yes. My character in the film is blue. Onir has given every character in the movie a certain shade. A shade which they have in their life, they can associate with that color. The reason he gave me the color blue was because it's the color of water. It's like my character. It can be very calm or flowing but you never really know the depth. This was Onir's decision taken sub-consciously.

Your future projects?
Well I have Salaam-E-Ishq and a Punjabi film Waris Shah which is under production and will be released soon. I will start filming for Bhootnath and Swami soon.

Could you put some light on the same?
Salaam-E-Ishq is a film I have done for Nikhil Advani. My track is with Anil Kapoor. It's a nice track. Little serious, little emotional. The film is very interesting. It's a nice, glossy, lively, fun bollywood film with a little emotional track of mine. Waris Shah is a very beautiful film I have done in Punjabi. Waris Shah was the poet who wrote Heer Ranjha. His Heer became most popular. It's a period film with Gurdas Mann. It's a romanticized version of what his life could have been. I will start soon start working on Bhoothnath and Swami.

You once sang a song at Zee Cine awards and your voice was appreciated a lot. So don't you think you should go for singing in your films?
I don't know. Let's see. Maybe some day I will.