Upon its release in 1982, Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth proved to be a massive success. The film was inspired by Bhatt’s extramarital relationship with late actor Parveen Babi. Speaking at a recent appearance, Shabana Azmi recalled how the movie initially did not have a script. Azmi was one of the lead actors in the film.
Speaking at a session at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, Shabana Azmi talked about how Mahesh Bhatt did not have a script for Arth initially. She mentioned that the movie was shot ‘ad hoc’ as Bhatt was going through a ‘personal crisis.’ The movie went ahead with the story idea that Bhatt had but she mentioned how the director shaped it well. She said, “Mahesh Bhatt was going through a personal crisis. We didn’t have a script, we had a story idea, and as we were shooting it went along, it was all very ad hoc. I would wear my clothes and turn up on sets. But there was something inside him. It was like he would press a button and immediately I would start, the experience was amazing.”
Azmi said that not having a script also impacted her acting but she was asked to go by the director. She continued, “For instance, if he would give me a difficult scene to do, and expected me to do it right away, I would say, ‘I can’t do it’, he would say, ‘Artificial conflict is not allowed, we don’t have time, you better do it.”
In an earlier conversation with Filmfare, Bhatt talked about how Arth came into being. The director wrote the film based on his affair with Babi while he was married to Kiran Bhatt. He said, “Parveen was reduced to rubble. It was experiencing death at close range. The fires of that and the pain of abandoning my first wife, whom I loved dearly, were part of my emotional tank. So I thought let me make one film my way, as I see it. And not fit or fall in line with market tastes. Let me make movies about the silences we keep hearing in conversations, beneath the spoken word. That’s where Arth came from.”
Apart from Azmi, Arth also starred Smita Patil and Kulbhushan Kharbanda in key roles.
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