From Bihar to Hollywood: Nitu Chandra Srivastava on her grand odyssey 

Express News Service

Halfway via the telephonic dialog with Nitu Chandra Srivastava, forward of the Indian digital premiere of her Hollywood debut, Never Back Down: Revolt, the actor connects our chat to certainly one of her learnings over time. “It’s important to stay humble and grounded, regardless of who you are and what you are trying to do. Everybody in this world is working hard to give their best; look at you, working on a Sunday morning, look at the person who put us together for this interview… Everyone is trying their best, especially amidst the chaos surrounding us, when the world is changing at a drastic pace. This is a major learning from the Indian film industry.”

The actor appears fairly conscious of the hardships and failures she has circumvented over the course of her 17-year-long profession and takes satisfaction in it. “From where I come, Bihar, young girls don’t really aspire to become actors or sportswomen,” says Nitu, who holds a black belt in taekwondo, having represented India thrice in World Championship. “I’m proud that I come from a place where the burden is not about making it big in life but giving your all to whatever profession you choose. After debuting with Garam Masala in 2005, my thought process began to evolve as I got exposed to one brilliant talent after another, such as Amitabh Bachchan and Naseeruddin Shah. That’s when I started to get into the groove of acting and tried to educate myself every minute. Acting, after all, is all about living, not just thinking. I guess it has all paid off,” she says.

Nitu believes her sports activities background performed a significant half in serving to her land the position in Never Back Down: Revolt. Sharing how the undertaking got here her manner, Nitu says, “I started traveling to the US to seek opportunities and was invited to the premiere of Bad Boys for Life, where I met the producers of Never Back Down, who were working on the fourth installment. I pointed out in jest that they were action producers and I’m an action actor and that got them curious about my work. When I told them about my tryst with taekwondo, they roped me in. Landing in a film without an audition and look test is uncommon in Hollywood, and it was made possible only by David Zelon (one of the producers), who placed a blind bet on me. It only added to my happiness when he told me that nobody would have played the character, Jaya, better than me.”

Nitu has another reason to cherish the movie—her character Jaya was apparently written round her real-life persona, along with her ethnicity seeping into the position. “When I met Audrey Arkins, the film’s writer, we chatted about my life and how people of Bihar are tough from the inside, although they maintain a persistent, pleasant smile on their faces. She quickly asked, ‘What if you played a character that’s the opposite of what you just described?’ And the result is Jaya, a cold-blooded killer.”

Her taekwondo expertise got here in useful however didn’t mollify the problem of the task she had signed up for. “We trained for the action sequences for almost a month, every day beginning at 7 in the morning, and this was followed by two and a half weeks of shooting. Doing it with bare feet in freezing temperatures was a crazy experience. After a point, as punches landed on my body, I got numb; I didn’t feel a thing. Tim Man, the action choreographer, did a wonderful job with composing the sequences. Every punch, slap kick and back kick were carefully choreographed. In fact, it was like music. Fighting is no different to dance; it’s about rhythmic movement between two people,” observes Nitu, who feels that the movie has opened doorways for her in Hollywood, the place she supposedly is to work on two extra movies.

Nitu has been an advocate for “cleaner” Bhojpuri cinema, propagating the necessity for movies in her mom tongue to shed the “crass and adult-centric” tag they’ve come to be attributed with. She produced two movies thus far, with the sophomore undertaking, the Maithili-language drama, Mithila Makhaan, bagging her a National Award in 2017. 

It’s a battle, she admits, nevertheless it’s a path she is prepared to persist in. “Five languages of Bihar—Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili, Angika and Vajjika—are spoken by over 50 million people globally, but there is no content to watch with their families. I want to change that.” Nitu says her mission is to “produce films from my roots” whereas “acting in national and international films”. 

She concludes by referring to Robert Frost’s, ‘The Road Not Taken’. “People never tend to take the uncommon, untouched path, but I have and will continue to. I’m glad to have chosen this route and I hope many will follow.”