Pitobash Tripathy shot into limelight in 2011 with his effortless performance as a pirated bookseller's sidekick in the film 'Shor In The City'. On May 16, 2014, the actor's upcoming film 'Million Dollar Arm', a biographical sports drama directed by Craig Gillespie under the banner of Walt Disney Pictures, will hit international theatres, hopefully catapulting his career to new heights.
I called Pitobash, who is in Los Angeles attending the premiere of his film, to talk about his experience shooting 'Million Dollar Arm' with John Hamm and things that get him riled up about Indian cinema and its audience.
Million Dollar Arm is the true story of two small-town Indian boys Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel who won a reality show and became the first Indian professional baseball players with a contract with the Pittsburg Pirates in the US. They were discovered by sports agent JB Bernstein, who was undergoing a slump in his career at that time. Bernstein, or JB to all connected with the sport, noticed the similarities between cricket and baseball and decided to fuse the fanatic enthusiasm for the two sports in America and India to create players who could pitch as good as they could bowl.
Hamm of Mad Men fame plays Bernstein. Other stars include Bill Paxton as pitching coachTom House, Suraj Sharma of 'Life of Pi' fame as Singh, Madhur Mittal as Patel and Pitobash as a baseball-crazy Indian who does not have the physique to play the sport so acts as an interpreter instead.
"People are mad about cricket in India, and nobody understands baseball here. Similarly in the US people are mad about baseball, so JB had this idea, what if he selected men in India who could bowl well and trained them to play major league baseball in the US?" Pitobash says.
His is the only character whose name was changed in the film. "This guy, Deepesh Solanki (name changed to Amit Rohan in the film) joins the three of them as a translator. But he has his own ambitions. Physically he is not eligible to play the game, but he loves it. He wants to be a coach. He was the first certified baseball coach of India."
It was wonderful working with Hamm and Arkin, he says. "They are so wonderful, very professional, great actors but so humble and nice human beings. The most important point is, they respect everybody's work, but at the end, the film is the most important thing to them, more than the individual," Pitobash says.
The film was shot in India - at Lucknow, Agra and Mumbai - and also at Atlanta and Los Angeles.
But when he starts talking about Indian cinema, Pitobash gets slightly riled up with the fact that the media and Indian audiences do not always give independent artistes their due. Although he acknowledges that all that is changing with more and more small budget films breaking convention. "You can't help it that the industry is star driven. People are investing crores of money," he says.
"Our media is also stars-oriented, they are not interested in talking to actors like us. I get 9 nominations for 'Shor' and nobody is interested. They make stars of people with Bollywood background even six months before their film comes out, you shouldn't only blame the industry. There are actors who give a good performance in every second film but nobody cares about them. Changes are happening but it takes time," he says.
He says it's difficult for a person who does not come from a non-film background like him. But the discipline that is needed to make a career of acting is often not there in our young stars.
"Blame it on education. Half the population does not know that acting ke liye bhi padai karna padta hai (You need to study acting too). People think 'I am good looking so I can be an actor' and come down to Bombay to try their luck."
"There are many actors who aren't even actors but they are big stars earning in crores, people make their films a hit," he says. But Pitobash is hopeful that with media focus on method actors, things will eventually change.
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