It’s difficult to hold back your surprise when Naseeruddin Shah, one of India’s foremost art house actors, says the film industry doesn’t interest him greatly. In a career spanning almost four decades, Shah has worked with Dadasaheb Phalke Award-winning director Shyam Benegal and James Bond actor Sean Connery, won acclaim for his movie roles and continues to dabble in theatre.

But Shah wasn’t exactly a child prodigy. His grades were the poorest in class and his teachers thought he would “find it difficult to amount even to a small bag of beans,” he writes in his memoir “And Then One Day.”

It took him a long time to grow out of the conviction that he was a “complete idiot,” Shah told me when I met him at The Oberoi, a hotel in central Delhi.

Shah, born in 1949 or 1950 (he isn’t sure) in a small town near Lucknow, began writing “And Then One Day” because he “had nothing else to do” and continued as he found he enjoyed it though he is “still frightened of the computer.” He discussed his autobiography and his life in an interview with India Insight.

Edited excerpts from the interview.

Q: Why did you choose to call your memoir “And Then One Day”?

A: It’s just a “kahani kehne ka jo andaaz hota hai na, ek tha raja ek thi raani” (“It’s just a way of telling a story, there once was a king and a queen”) kind of thing — “once upon a time”. It’s that kind of a phrase which I thought is quite suitable in my case. Because it’s an intriguing title also. Because it might give you the feeling that one day everything suddenly changed “jab ki aisa kuch hua nahi tha kuch meri zindagi mein” (“while nothing like that happened in my life”). So I quoted that verse from that song which I love which is about a person who has wasted a lot of his life. At one stage, I felt that I have done that or at least I got very delayed in starting off my education.

Q: This is your first book. Did the publishers or anyone say the title could sound drab?

A: Yeah, they did. But the titles they suggested were worse.

Q: You say your time in Nainital’s St. Joseph’s College [also called Sem because the school was originally a seminary in the 19th century] wasn’t the happiest. Do you think flunking Class 9 was probably the best thing that happened to you?

A: The greatest blessing that happened to me [is] that my father pulled me out of Sem. Had I stayed on in Sem, I would have been a wreck. I am convinced of this. Those priests had made it their responsibility to destroy my confidence. I don’t want to sound as if I am talking a paranoid conspiracy but what I mean is that they were very backward in their understanding of human behaviour. That’s all I can say about them. And evidently, I have offended a lot of people who love Sem very much.

Q: I am from the same school.

A: You are? Well, I had no idea whether you like it or don’t like it. But whether you like it or hate it, what I see is you are entitled to your opinion about it. And I will not contest that opinion. If you say that you love it. Now I don’t understand why if I say I was unhappy in that school, people should start attacking me and say how dare you say a thing like this. I don’t see what business it is of theirs.

Q: You write that you were completely sure you were an idiot. When did you get past that belief?

A: Very gradually. It took a lot of time and it was via theatre that it happened.

Q: Was it in NSD (National School of Drama)?

A: In NSD it began. I would rather say it began at Poona in the Film Institute. NSD I went through in a blaze of glory and success and arrogance. Undeserved success actually. Because I understood nothing of the technique of acting at that time.

Q: Your brothers were very supportive. Did they believe you’d become the actor that you are?

A: They didn’t know what to think, but they encouraged me. Neither of them told me “no, don’t do this”. They were sceptical naturally but they continuously encouraged me and I owe them a lot.

Q: The legendary actor Dilip Kumar told you movies are not for “boys from good families”. Would you offer the same advice to an aspiring actor?

A: No, I wouldn’t. I would say think about it deeply and complete your education first. Don’t opt for acting as an escape from education.

Q: Did you, at any time, think of an alternative career path?

A: No. I think that is why I had to succeed in this. I never left myself any alternative. I did want to be a cricketer. When my brother came home from NDA (National Defence Academy) I felt “wow, I should like to wear that uniform”. But I didn’t want to join the army. I never thought of anything else.

Q: Tell me something about the ‘Merchant of Venice’ play that you performed in school. Something that you haven’t shared in you memoir. [He played Shylock, something that he mentions in the book]

A: No, I don’t think there is anything [more] except that it was a life-changing event. If I’ve had any life-changing event, it was that. Because having succeeded in that gave me my first taste of acceptance and self worth. And I had done it all by myself, so I was all the more proud of it. And suddenly people who would walk past me, would approach me to talk to me and so on. It just changed everything. It just changed the way I looked at the world and it changed the way the world looked at me. That’s how I can describe it at best.

Q: You’re critical of Hindi cinema as it was when you were young. What has Bollywood’s reaction been to your book?

A: I don’t think anybody’s ever going to read it. Film industry people don’t read books.

Q: You didn’t want to be in song-and-dance sequences, but you still took up those roles?

A: I had to do it. I never did it well. But I tried to do it because there is no harm in being popular. I was very happy in the kind of films I was doing. But since I was offered these as well, I thought that I would give it a try. Didn’t work out.

Q: Do you regret doing “Tridev?”

A: No, I don’t. Of course, I don’t regret it. It helped my career. It helped my bank balance. So I am grateful to “Tridev”, very grateful to it but I didn’t enjoy watching the film and I was very surprised it was such a huge success.

Q: As an actor, do you sometimes get a script that looks marvellous on paper but becomes a hugely disappointing film?

A: Oh yeah. Many times, many times. And the reverse, too, has happened where you don’t have too much hope for the film. “Masoom” being one of the first such cases and there have been many others where I have felt the script could be better but then the film transcended the script, at times.

Q: In your book, you say films about films don’t work and then you let the reader ponder over it.

A: Let the reader ponder… What I want the reader to figure out is – has he ever seen in Indian films, a convincing film about film, about the film world? Never. Absolutely never. The first and only film that will come to mind is “Kaagaz Ke Phool” by Guru Dutt, which was about a director who was past his prime and all that sort of thing. It’s called a masterpiece by everyone, but I beg to disagree. I don’t like that film at all. It’s a very shallow, fake film in my opinion. It does not show the film industry truthfully. It’s a very romanticized, sugar- coated vision of the film industry. And that is how most of them are. All of them are, rather. Our film industry is too surreal to make a film about.

Q: So what do you think about “The Dirty Picture”?

A: I don’t think about “Dirty Picture”. It’s over, it’s done with. What is there to think about?

Q: Are you happy with the way the film was made?

A: Not entirely. It brought me some money and it was a success so I guess I am happy with it. But I think it’s very difficult to make a film on a subject like that, on a truly tragic person. It would have been [a] very dark, depressing film had it been made truthfully, according to that girl’s life.

Q: You’re saying the film wasn’t made truthfully?

A: No, no. It was a confectionized version of her life and that is why it succeeded — because it was a very pleasant, popcorn kind of movie. It was not a dark, disturbing film, which it should have been.

Q: You mean the director, producer and the audience in India don’t have the appetite for dark, real world films?

A: Yeah, they don’t. But the truth also is that the dark depressing films we try to make only end up being boring. Those films are also not made with perception and with skill. You can’t expect an audience which has come there to have a good time and eat ice cream and popcorn to enjoy a depressing film. It’s as simple as that. So if you want to make films of that kind they will always have a niche audience, a certain section will see them and not everybody. So you mustn’t expect the kind of success that Dirty Picture had if you decide to make dark, depressing films.

Q: You’ve always been brutally honest about your opinion of films such as “Kaagaz Ke Phool” or Amitabh Bachchan’s choice of films. What reaction does your opinion generate in the film industry?

A: I really have no idea. The film industry does not interest me greatly. The people, I don’t mingle with them much. I meet them when I have to.

Q: In that case, why are you there?

A: As Mr. Raaj Kumar told me, it’s a good way to make a living.

Q: An actor you’ve perhaps tried to emulate?

A: There are plenty I liked even in the past, but I did not try to emulate any of them because I thought it’s beyond me to try to emulate Shammi Kapoor or Dilip Kumar so let me find what I can bring to the table. I remember thinking, why should I be the second so and so. Let me be the first whoever I am. But there are many actors that I loved. I think Mahmood saheb was one of the most skillful actors I’ve ever seen. I would even consider him close to Charlie Chaplin in terms of his skill as an actor. He was probably the most skillful actor that Hindi cinema has ever had.

Q: Do you think India is now making the kind of films that you’ve wanted to act in?

A: Yeah. I am acting in them as far as I can. I’ve done many which haven’t got released. Young filmmakers still approach [me] for their kind of films. In fact, I am committed to do a new film in December, which is by a first-time filmmaker from London, an Indian girl which is a wonderful script and it’s just my kind of a film. At the moment, I am acting in a film called “Welcome Back” which is by Anees Bazmee, a thoroughly commercial film. I’ve always been able to balance the two, art house and commercial films. Commercial cinema has somehow continued to need me every now and then and that’s fine by me because it is because of commercial cinema I am lucky to live a good life.

Q: Is this a better time for you to be an actor or was it better in the past?

A: It’s just getting better and better. And I am getting roles like I got in “A Wednesday” or “Ishqiya” or “The Dirty Picture”, all three of which I like and I enjoyed doing all those three roles. And the small movies at the same time.

Q: You call award galas “mutual jerking off”. Why?

A: Yeah. I hate them. They are boring. They bore me to death and they mean absolutely nothing.

Q: You come across as quite dilfaik (flirtatious) in your memoir?

A: Aren’t we all? Some of us admit it, some don’t. But we’re all like that.

Q: So when did that end?

A: Never ended. Continues. I am the same. See it is quite simply this. Everybody asks me, “your book is very honest, was it difficult?” I decided to recall things as clearly as I could and report them as clearly as I could. I didn’t care about who was going to feel what. And the question I asked myself was, if you’re not going to talk about things truthfully, why talk about them at all. And if you’re going to ornament things then you might as well write fiction. Why write your life story? There are things I haven’t talked about because there was no need to talk about them.

Q: Your best and worst film performances?

A: The worst. There are many. There are too many. I try to be objective about it. “Nishant” and “Masoom” are the two best films as films. “A Wednesday” also is one of the best films as a film. In all these three, I also like my own performance.

Q: Any plans of returning to directing?

A: No, not film directing. I am directing on the stage and I am happy doing that. I think I am more suited for that kind of thing. Not film.

(Editing by Robert MacMillan; Follow Sankalp on Twitter @sankalp_sp and Robert @bobbymacReports | This article is website-exclusive and cannot be reproduced without permission)