When I was 28, I made this film called 'Drinking Buddies' that I starred in and produced, and we improvised the entire thing, and it was a complete exercise in freedom of expression in making something for only the purpose of making it, not for recognition or money or anything else, and it's still my favorite thing I've ever done.
Back in the fifties I was the hot, young comic on CBS and a regular on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' I was also starring in shows on Broadway and acting in dramatic programs on television. Those were the glory days of television. It was like theater. It was live. If an actor forgot a line, he improvised. There was an immediacy to it.
When I go in to 'Comedy Bang Bang,' I'll go in most of the time with some beats of where we're going with the idea. Everything else is improvised. Nothing is scripted. A lot of times I'll go in there with nothing and it's just conversation with the character.
I think I wanted to do something that retained the improvised chaos of 'Mamma Mia' the theatre show which set it apart from all the slick packaged productions.
Sukumar comes from a very different school of working style. He never shoots with set dialogues and scenes. Most of it is improvised on the spot. He'd tell me, 'Rakul, if this is your character, how would you behave? Show me.'
In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.
In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines.
I get good references from a wide range of music. Something who's been a good influence in the last few years is Qawwali music. If you listen to a Qawwali singer like Aziz Mian - he's like James Brown. Qawwali is like Pakistani gospel-jazz. It's emotional, but it's also improvised, and it's all about that sacred-and-profane tightrope.
I've always been a jazz fan, but I don't write much about jazz, because I don't have the chops. But it's really, really hard to write about improvised instrumental music when you don't have a good knowledge of harmony and can't identify rhythm signatures very easily either.
I'd been collecting eccentric moves since I was a kid and didn't even know that the dance step I improvised in 'Be Back Soon' was called a 'pas de basque.'
