Interview: Leena Yadav
By: Ashika Sengupta
Indian culture can be rather superstitious, believing in fate-determined, star-aligned or card-speaking scenarios.
For Bollywood director Leena Yadav, she is counting her blessings for ending up with a scenario of helming a production aligning two of the world’s biggest film stars in a flick about playing cards.
Regardless of how fortunate she was, odds are Yadav believes less in fate and more in probability in directing Teen Patti, which stars Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan and Hollywood superstar Sir Ben Kingsley.
A film about a college professor trying to prove false the theory of probability in all situations except card games, Yadav told reporters Teen Patti is as much about gambling and fate as it is about today’s short-attention-spanned Indian youth.
“Probability is a very interesting theory in mathematics. You can even apply it just by logic. It doesn’t need an equation there,” Yadav told reporters in her promotional interview with the press this week. “We went through the whole process and then simplified it.”
Yadav said the idea of making a film on the subject was lying dormant in her mind for a long time, but the plot developed after she researched on the card scams in the U.S.
“I always wanted to make a film on the mindset of today’s youth where they want to be rich and successful very fast. I read a lot about card scams and did a lot of research on greed and the psychology behind that … spoke to a lot of my friends. All through the process, I started finding it more and more interesting, and then, when Shiv Subramanyam and I started writing, the characters automatically evolved,” she said.
Before shooting began, Yadav did a reality check on an illegal gambling hideout to know how makeshift casinos function.
“In Mumbai, gambling is illegal, so in different shady places, they make temporary set-ups so they can escape if there is a raid. While shooting, I took the creative liberty of shooting it on a set, but before that, I visited one functioning ‘adda’ to have a feel of what exactly happens there. It was quite risky,” she said.
Apart from the two veterans, the film also stars R. Madhavan, and the director is also introducing four new faces — Siddharth Kher, Vaibhav Talwar, Dhruv Ganesh and Shakti Kapoor’s daughter Shraddha Kapoor.
When asked why she chose four newcomers, Yadav said, “Mr.Bachchan, Sir Ben Kingsley, Madhavan and the four debutant actors are the primary actors. While choosing these four actors, we were in two minds whether to take established actors or go with fresh faces. Finally, we decided to take these young people because they fit the age they require to play in the film. It took us eight to ten months to cast them. We went to different cities for auditions and finally chose them.”
