“There were mobile libraries that stocked books by many Soviet publishers.” Atul’s family was in the shoe business, and there was trade between sellers in Agra (known for its footwear industry) and in the Soviet Union. “Any decision that was made in Delhi affected the business my family was in. It shaped the conversations at home,” he says.Atul pitched the idea of Berlin to many actors before zeroing in on Rahul Bose, Aparshakti Khurana and Ishwak Singh (“They seemed the most excited to hear it”). Aparshakti and Ishwak learnt sign language for four to six months before getting on set. The interrogation scenes were particularly tricky to shoot for Aparshakti as he had to deliver dialogues in sign language and verbally. “Sometimes in sign language the sentence construction is strange,” says the actor.“For example, if I have to say ‘let’s go upstairs and do this interview’, in sign language I might say ‘upstairs’ first and ‘do this interview’ later. My lines I had to speak straight, in sign language it was a different format and on top of that I had to remember Ishwak’s lines too. It was a tough task.”Aparshakti also shared another difficulty of “pacing” he faced while shooting for the film. Berlin is a slow-burn, sombre feature, and the actor said he had to calm himself to be in sync with the mood of the film. “I am quite a livewire,” he shares. “I mean I have been an overexcited radio jockey. I had to really scold myself and control my energy.”Last week, Atul took to social media and shared a picture of a handwritten list of films that he re-watched before getting into the making of Berlin. There were some spy/surveillance regulars like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) but, strangely, there were also some Hindi dramas like Sparsh (1980) and New Delhi Times (1986). “In Sparsh, a differently-abled teacher teaches differently-abled kids. I took inspiration for Pushkin from there.In New Delhi Times, a different kind of Delhi is shown, of newsrooms and diplomatic quarters. I wanted to get a sense of that,” says Atul. The director also explains how interviews with some Narcotics Control Bureau officers that he conducted while researching for his 2010 TV series Powder, helped during Berlin. “They had shared some manuals in which there was a chapter titled ‘How to do surveillance?’” he says. So, this time, did he meet any spies to understand their way of working? “How to!” he says with a laugh. “That will blow their cover.”
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