Kamal Haasan and Manisha Koirala in Mumbai Express

This man believes in doing everything on his own terms. Be it shrinking himself to dwarfish proportions or blossoming into an elderly woman or getting back to the era of silence on screen. So it should not come as a surprise that when he flies down to Mumbai for a few hours to shoot for an MTV interview and learns about a Calcutta call, he takes the name and number along and does the calling himself on the way back.

In the days of his Ek Duje ke Liye or Saagar, there was no publicity for films other than posters on the walls and the odd song on Doordarshan?s Wednesday evening Chitrahaar. Today, a satellite channel shoots a separate programme on the making of his latest release Mumbai Xpress.

And Kamal Haasan has chugged along with the changing trends of the film industry. ?The increased exposure does help. It [television] is a sensible way to promote a film.? He adds as an afterthought: ?It becomes a record of what we say at different stages.? A surprise concern, considering he comes from an industry infested with denial-a-day interviewees.

Mumbai Xpress, the latest offering from his production house Raaj Kamal Films, is about ?a kidnap gone wrong and two fatherless children finding a family?. Kamal Haasan plays a daredevil death-well rider in a circus company. ?It involved a lot of rough riding on a motorcycle and vertigo-instigating heights.?

He knows, for he did the stunts himself. And was involved in a crash to pay for his adventurism. ?It happened during the shoot. So it is there in the film. People who saw me fall, say it could have been fatal. The pillion-rider was a 10-year-old. I wouldn?t have forgiven myself if anything had happened to him. Thankfully, he didn?t even have a scratch.? It matters less that he himself now sports a bandaged arm.

If Mumbai Xpress has seen Kamal Haasan take real-life risks, his own productions are on-the-edge stuff in terms of reel experimentation. But he brushes aside the suggestion: ?Crossing the road these days is an experiment. Everyone is experimenting. No one is a Nostradamus in the film industry.? The real answer comes on prodding. ?A man who is aesthetically inclined will do it (experiment). There is this invisible command from within that eggs you on to do better work. Once a project is over, I untangle myself from it and step back. I don?t carry any star baggage with me. I become part of the audience. Marlon Brando used to say acting is neurotic business. That way, I am a neurotic actor.?

Talk of the audience brings up the question of whether the film-viewing public is more open now with sensible films finding box-office favour. But the actor-producer immediately protests. ?The audience was always open. The lobby of business pundits was not. Now that there are more venues to exhibit the film with the coming of the multiplexes, their hold on the merchandise has slackened. Satellite television has also emerged as a major viewing facility.?

So, would Appu Raja and Pushpak, his masterpieces that were rejected a decade ago, have found favour now? The multiple National Award-winner brushes the suggestion aside. ?Any movie released would do better now. More venues means more tickets sold.? Simple arithmetic.

But what is not so simple is the trouble back home over the title of the film. That morning, the papers carried reports of nearly 100 workers of the Dalit Panthers of India being arrested for trying to storm some cinemas showing Mumbai Xpress. The crux of their protest is the use of an English word in the title. ?MJR (actor-politician M.J. Ramachandran), who was a champion for the Tamil cause, used his name in the English alphabetical order, not the Tamil one. He was a Keralite by birth,? Kamal takes a breath after the agitated volley, and mutters, as if to remind himself and the protesters, ?This is a free country.?

Are people in south India too sensitive? This draws the deep-throated chuckle that is typical of the man. ?This is coming from Calcutta, huh?? A call for explanation takes him down memory lane. ?(People in Tamil Nadu are) Not so sensitive as Bengalis. Nowhere is civic discontent expressed more vocally on the road. I was shooting for a Bengali film called Kabita, some 20 years back. There was a dharna on the streets. I asked what?s happening. They told me that passengers are not happy, so they are expressing their dissatisfaction.?

The conversation veers towards another problem area. The censor board?s scissors have snipped an entire item song from the film. ?It was my tongue-in-cheek comment on item songs. I was using flesh to tell the story. The censors didn?t like it. I am a saint. I cannot use the colours. I have to wear saffron,? sarcasm drips from every word.

What is his take on the trend? ?I think you and I are speaking the same language. It?s a rabid monotonous clich? that is there in film after film,? the earnestness rings through. Kamal had ?used these ladies as sutradhars?. ?They (the censors) said they are skimpily clad. They allow that in every film. Suddenly in my film they had to cut it all. ?You are a good film-maker. Why are you using all this?? they asked. Not fair.?

Kamal consoles himself with a celebrated unfair snipping act. ?Remember the stabbing scene in Psycho? Not a single stab was shown. That is the sequence they (censors) wanted out of the way. I can understand Mr Hitchcock?s frustration.?

If the item girls have gone missing, the eye candy is there in the form of Manisha Koirala. Wasn?t she a last-minute inclusion after Tabu and Bipasha didn?t work out? ?Not last minute, last week,? Kamal clarifies. ?I called a friend and there she was.?

The film is being directed by S. Srinivasa Rao, a long-time favourite. Why not himself? ?I could have directed, but there is this digital thing I am shepherding.? Mumbai Xpress is the first film from south India to have been digitally censored. ?Also I wanted to quickly move on to the next project.? The name of the next Tamil project is ? well, too long. He interprets the silence and translates ? Hunt and Play. Shooting starts in two weeks.

Kamal?s last film in Hindi, Abhay, did not do well. He concedes that he is apprehensive. But the Friday verdict from Tamil Nadu has been good. His favourite film, he says, is always his latest. ?I get bored. Like the audience, I, too, want to move on to the next release.?