When you speak with Taapsee, you get to know one thing about her instantly – she doesn’t mince words. She calls a spade a spade and no one would’ve been more befitting to play the role ‘MinalArora’ in Pink. She is just as fierce and indomitable in real life.
Pink addresses some very important issues at hand like gender stereotypes. Do you ever recall being treated unfair just because you are a woman?
I think, all women, from the time we are born, have been through numerous such situations, so much so that now we are used to it and they have become a part of our lives. We have stopped even reacting to them now. Things like a girl is supposed to sit crossed leg or a girl should play lighter sports and not something more aggressive like football or cricket have been conditioned and are put into our heads. As children, gender roles have been defined for us as we saw our moms being a certain way and our dads being a certain way. So, one grows up thinking this is what the future is going to be like. So the girls are forced to think that when they grow up they are going to become mothers. A lot of our families still have mothers as housewives, my mother is a housewife! She has always taken care of the house, while there’s nothing wrong with that, the gender roles are set in our minds; mothers will be homemakers and fathers will be breadwinners. When we grow up, we hear things about how female drivers are lousy even though most accidents are caused by men and at work place if a woman gets a hike, it is because she is a woman but not because of her talent. With jobs, there is a huge pay disparity between a man and a woman and my career is the biggest example. An actor who has done half the films or even lesser than what I have done gets paid more than me. They say that the market is defined by a hero, but who makes such rules? Men right?
What was the most challenging scene for you in Pink?
For a person who has to play the role of a molested victim, from the beginning till the end, nothing is easy! Even if you are doing a lighter scene, you always have to have a layer to yourself that you have been through molestation. You can never be normal! There were a few sequences, which were heavier than the others. The court sequences, which were mostly single takes or the scene where I slap my friend Falak for having confessed to the court that we had taken the money; there were no dialogues and the scene purely relied on emotions and there is a very interesting graph from anger, disappointment to sheer helplessness. The last scene where I had to thank Mr.Bachchan, which was impromptu and not part of the script was also pretty challenging. Shoojit told me, “I want you to do something that conveys the message that, this is the only man who stood beside you and fought for you.” I had to go through a lot of psychological turmoil and stress before I got onto the sets everyday. I had no makeup or hairdo in the film, so in that time, I had to brainwash and sort of psyche myself out before I walked out from my van to perform these scenes.
We are a society steeped in patriarchal values. Do you think films like Pink will make a difference to people’s mindset?
Well, that was purely the intention. We didn’t expect it to become a blockbuster but to our surprise it did wonderfully well at the box office too! When we were discussing how the film would do, we thought the film would make only half of what it actually earned at the box office. We knew that the film would stir in a lot of debates and discussions and this was our motive – we wanted people to talk about things that they normally don’t talk about out in the open. For instance, there are a few things that a father and a daughter don’t discuss, they are considered taboo. We wanted to open avenues for such discussions to happen. Even if the film made a difference to a certain section of the society, we consider ourselves successful. The kind of responses we have got for the film is staggering – the mails, the texts and people have walked out of the theatres crying their hearts out. When a film is good, people usually congratulate you for it. In Pink, people wanted to do more than that; they wanted to discuss the aspects of the film and more than anything else, they said, “ thank you for making this film.” How many times do you hear thank you for making a film or doing a certain role?