Goldfish has a number of gut-punch moments. The biggest one for me was when Anamika reveals that sometimes she tells people she’s adopted, her mother replies that she does the same thing, and the two of them just burst out laughing. Your character also has a line where she says: “I think my mother still has postpartum depression”. What was it like bringing this dynamic to life on screen with Deepti Naval?
I mean, that’s the thing, you know? We have terrible tragedies in life, but we have to find ways to cope, we have to laugh, and that’s what these characters do all the time. Even the thing about being adopted, it’s nasty as hell, but it makes you laugh because it’s like “Yeah, well, we have to keep going.” Coping mechanisms.
Working on the dynamic with Deepti was a lot of fun. We just didn’t know what would happen next. The real treat was that Pushan [Kripalani], being the DOP [director of photography] and the director, had decided to keep three cameras rolling at the same time — one on Deepti, one on me, and one on the scene overall. So it meant that we saw the scene as a whole, and not in bits. When you normally shoot, you do a master, where you have the whole scene from a distance, and then that becomes the template. And you have to replicate that, so you’re stuck. So you never do too much in the master, you always keep it a little on the safe side. But here, we were going wild. We didn’t know what the other person would do next, we didn’t know if something would break or smash (to the horror of everybody on the crew). But for us, it was fun to be able to do that. And thankfully, Deepti’s someone who lights up when the camera comes on. She won’t tell you in rehearsal what she’s going to do. And so you only see it when it’s actually happening.
What are some fun moments you can recall from set?
At one stage, there was a scene — which is now cut out of the film — it was a dream in which we see a dead goldfish, like a real, dead goldfish. And we were like, “Where do we get a dead goldfish?” So production went to the pet store where there were plenty of goldfish, all of which were … alive and healthy. They asked the pet store, “Can we get a dead goldfish?” They were like, “We don’t have a dead goldfish. Why would we keep a dead goldfish?” “Okay, so can you tell us when the next goldfish dies?” And then the driver, who was listening to this conversation — this tattooed, Eastern European tough guy, says, “I get you dead goldfish.” And we’re like, “No, we don’t want you to kill a goldfish!” And he said, “You step outside. In five minutes, I get you dead goldfish.” [Laughs] There was this whole drama around this dead goldfish, like, how do we do this ethically? In the end, we didn’t use the goldfish for the dream sequence, and the scene ended up being cut anyway. I’m very sad about it. I was like, “Pushan, it was my favourite scene!” But we have to respect the overall vision.