Yaay! I got 10 minutes with Kalki Koechlin and she was super sweet about it! Everything you wanted to know about That Girl in Yellow Boots and then some. I even asked her your Twitter questions, who loves ya baby? 🙂
Kalki Koechlin, “Ok here are the answers, hope I covered it all. and thanks again for all your enthusiasm and support :)”
P.S. That Girl In Yellow Boots releases in theaters tomorrow, September 2nd. Trust me – take a friend, go watch.
MM: Hi Kalki! Thanks for your time 🙂 first up I loved That Girl In Yellow Boots! How are you feeling as its about to release?
KK: Always a little nervous with this one coz its a bit like wearing your heart on your sleeve, emotionally intense, but I’m also really excited after such a long wait.
MM: That Girl In Yellow Boots is so offbeat, unusual and unique, how did you and Anurag come up with the story?
KK: AK formed the idea through several newspaper articles, one about a massage parlour raid, one about a German girl looking for her father in India, one about incest. I just created the various characters and dialogs between them, the story is his.
MM: My friend Marv watched the preview with me and had a very good question! How many pairs of Yellow boots did you go through filming?
KK: Only the one pair which I was wearing at the screening, Doc Martens are pretty good quality!
MM: We’re seeing you in a lot of movies, Shaitan, ZNMD etc. what’s next?
KK: My Friend Pinto comes out in October and I just finished Dibaker Banerjee’s film Shanghai. To be honest it’s a lot of releases in a row and I wish they were better spread out cos now there’ll be a big break before anymore releases while I work on new projects, but got to take what comes along and make the most of it 😉
MM: In ZNMD you play such a stereotypical girlfriend/fiance how did you feel about that? Was it easy/hard?
KK: It was fun, the hard part was making her realistic and not a complete psycho, nagging bitch. I wanted her to have some sensitivity to her, which I hope came through.
MM: You and Anurag make such a cute couple, if you don’t mind my asking, how did you fall in love? When did you know? Is it hard to work together, like do you ever switch off?
KK: I fell for him when I realised how simple he was, how honest he was and not trying to be cool and suave, just being himself. He’s also very funny when he’s relaxed. Working together is intense but also really productive because we both have very different approaches and that helps create new ideas. I don’t tire of being with him because we spend so much time apart on other shoots.
MM: What’s your all-time favorite movie?
KK: It’s a black and white French film by Marcel Carne called Les Enfants Du Paradis.
MM: Also if there was one movie you could remake and star in what would it be?
KK: Oooo so many movies, I would have loved to be Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Cate Blanchet in Elizabeth, Smita Patel in Masala Mirch (this by no means says I would be better than them! They are all some of my favorite actors.)
MM: Did you ever consider giving That Girl In Yellow Boots a different ending? Could it have ended happily in a perfect world? (I was kinda hoping against hope right till the end *lol*) And if not the end but if there was one thing you could change about Ruth’s life in TGIYB what would it have been?
KK: I had given it a different ending where, Ruth and Prashant run away together and both leaving their sordid past behind, but AK felt there needed to be that unresolved feeling which is true, real life is usually more painful and lonely. I think if I could change one thing about Ruth’s life, it would be to get Ruth to listen to Naseer’s character Diwakar, the only genuine person in her life, and take his help and advice instead of walking away from him.
MM. Describe yourself in 3 words.
KK: Workaholic, self critical and lively.
MM: Please tell us one thing about you that people couldn’t never tell just by looking at you…
KK: That I read philosophy by Swami Vivekananda, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein…
MM: And your Twitter fans wanted to ask..
KK: No it is not a remake of anything, completely fictional.
KK: Thanks so much Arif.
KK: Nervous before I met them, but totally put at ease once I met them, both of them are intelligent, sweet and gentlemanly.
KK: Yup they are, and I got them on Neil street in London. By the way, did you know Doc Martens have lifetime guarantee? I found that funny, so I can hobble in when I’m sixty-five and ask for another pair of yellow boots 🙂
KK: Haha no I don’t try to make a statement, sometimes its just a dress I really want to wear, and sometimes I just love the originality of a dress. I have quite daring and varied tastes, and honestly sometimes its a last minute panic of ‘oh my God what am I going to wear??!’
KK: It makes a change from the conventional candlelit dinner!
KK: It was designed by Chaitanya from Studio Mantra.
MM: And finally, I’ve always wondered why your Twitter handle is @kalkikanmani, what does “Kanmani” mean? 🙂
KK: Kanmani was my nickname growing up in Ooty, in Tamil “Kanmani” is a term of endearment like ‘apple of my eye’ or ‘cute one’.
MM: How cute is that peeps? 🙂 xoxo