Suraj Shamar and Madhur Mittal Interview #MillionDollarArmEvent

Million Dollar Arm is in theaters everywhere telling the story inspired by Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, two young boys from India who enter the Million Dollar Arm contest, established by sports agent, J.B. Bernstein for a chance to change their life.

While Rinku and Dinesh are real young men, in the movie, they are played by Life of Pi star  Suraj Sharma and Slum Dog Millionaire star, Madhur Mittal, whom I had the honor of meeting and interviewing at the Loew’s Hotel in Los Angeles on May 10.

I was invited to this event by Disney and ABC as part of a media event. Accommodations and other expenses were paid for in exchange for my coverage of the event, but all opinions are my own and were not influenced in any way.

Q :    What compelled you to an audition? What was that like?

MADHUR:   I think the first thing that really hit- I think I speak for the both of us–was, this is a tremendous feat that these guys have achieved. I had no idea about Rinku or Dinesh. Nobody in my family knew of them. None of my friends knew this story. What these guys have achieved is something that nobody has ever done any sport in the history of mankind. 

I think it’s very important that this story reaches people. Also the fact that we’ll get a chance to portray real-life characters. 

SURAJ:    Yes, I feel the same way. It’s just the fact that these guys came from nothing, went and did something phenomenal. Nobody seems to realize this story and what Rinku and Dinesh did.

MADHUR:   Yes! They’re not applauded enough.

SURAJ:    Exactly. What they accomplished is super! It depressed me almost that I didn’t know myself. It just leads you to think that their story really needs to be told, and people need to know this. Besides the fact that it was an amazing feat, it just gives you a sense that there’s a whole lot out there that we don’t really realize; opportunity wise. The amount someone can work in a situation where they don’t know what’s going on and make something out of themselves, is really- it’s very inspiring.

 MADHUR:   Also I think it gave both of us a chance to showcase something different from what people have seen us do in our last films. I played a bad guy in my last film (Slum Dog Millionaire); Suraj played a completely different character (Life of Pi).  I think also it’s a great chance for us as young actors to portray something different and expand our spectrum as actors.

Q:        Have you played baseball prior to the film?

SURAJ:    Absolutely not [LAUGHTER]. Zero experience in baseball altogether. It was quite hard. We had a lot of fun during training though.

 MADHUR:  We didn’t know anything and then we were going to try and get all this stuff under our belt real quickly. We had three and a half weeks to do whatever we could do. We had our coaches flown down from the states. We had four hours of baseball every day. We are both quite scrawny boys, and are still very thin [LAUGHTER].   We had to put on a lot of muscle. We trained for three or four hours every day and then we would rest an hour, before going to the gym for a couple of hours. We followed a strict diet. It was quite physically challenging, but it helped, because it’s like a blank slate that you sling it with, which was exactly what his character and my character were also going through.

Rinku and Dinesh, they didn’t know anything, and then they had very little time. There was the high pressure of make it. Do it. There’s no other option. Going through this helped us understand the emotional parts.

SURAJ:    I think we had a lot of draw from the fact that we were in the similar situation. We had a really short amount of time to prepare before we had to perform on set. Rinku and Dinesh had just 10 months of preparation before they had to perform. It put us in a similar kind of mind frame.

Q:        Did you guys talk to the people you actually portrayed? And what was like maybe one or two things that you pull away from with the people that you’re portraying?

SURAJ:   For me, the biggest problem was that Rinku, since this time period that we are trying to portray to now, has changed massively even tremendously.

Rinku is so good at adapting that from the point when the movie ends to now, he’s become a completely different person, so talking to him at this point doesn’t really help me too much with all that we’re trying to do. But Dinesh helped.

MADHUR:    Dinesh was with us in Delhi when we were training for baseball and he hung out with us a lot, which is obviously great for me, because I’m portraying him in the film. But what he also did was, not only give us an insight hint of his mind, but he told us all these stories and anecdotes of what happened when they were really going through all this that we’re portraying in the film. His memories and stories would really give us a lot of insight into how Rinku was at the point in time or how JB was.

SURAJ:    Just real insights into how these people were feeling when everything was unraveling in front of them.

It was really great getting a lot of time to spend with Dinesh. It was really helpful for both of us. 

MADHUR:   And also the fact that Amit, in real life really did have that video recorder. He basically went around recording footage of everything through the process.

SURAJ:    Literally everything. Yes. 

MADHUR:   So we had this massive footage.

SURAJ:    A massive treasure.

MADHUR:   That’s how we got to know them before everything happened. Their body language was so different. Their physique was different. The way they looked at stuff and talked about everything was really different. All these things together helped us build these people in our heads.

Q:        What was your favorite scene to film?

SURAJ:    That a tough one. We actually had so much fun, just every day.We were quite a handful. We were just too young kids. They gave us a glove and ball; we would just keep playing all day long. They would literally have to drag us off set, but we had a lot of fun in a lot of scenes. The scene where they throw up was not fun.

MADHUR:   That scene was not fun for me. It stank [LAUGHTER]. They had some really disgusting vegetarian soup. It really stank.

SURAJ:    It wasn’t really while we were shooting that always that made it special, it was just literally the fact that everybody around us always was seemingly having an extremely awesome time. An amazing time. It was the fact that it all added to the dynamic that hopefully was being set up in front of the frame for the movie.

MADHUR:   There were some scenes that were really hard to shoot, like, for example, when we were shooting in India there were some really hot days. 145 degree. 140.

SURAJ:    140? It’s not degrees Celsius? It’s Fahrenheit degrees?!  I don’t if it got to 140, but it was really hot.

MADHUR:   It was a 140. I know this for a fact [LAUGHTER], because I checked. I was like my skin is burning how hot is it? Especially when we shot in Lucknow, that was the day. It was a 140.

We were enclosed in four walls and there was this huge ground in the middle. We had no air flow and the sun just beating down from top with thousands of these people in this small space. It was really hot and we had scenes where we were running around and pitching and what not in the heat.

SURAJ:    Yes. It wasn’t the hardest for us. Imagine those 300 to 400 people standing there in the heat.

MADHUR:   Yes, and just in the heat.

SURAJ:    And they have to act excited [LAUGHTER]!

MADHUR:   It’s very hard. This wasn’t something  they even do professionally like we do, so it was really hard.

SURAJ:    But, you know, they managed to do it. Everybody, kind of, pushed through it all. There were a lot of times when stuff got really hard or complicated for everybody.

MADHUR:   Jon (Hamm) probably changed his t-shirt like 20 times [LAUGHTER].

SURAJ:    It was really hot, but people managed. People really did- especially Jonn. I felt like he’s got this adaptive feature to him that you don’t often see.

MADHUR:   He’s a bit Rinku that way.

SURAJ:    Yes. Rinku’s also a little bit that way. You get somewhere extremely different, and then you just start taking in whatever you can as fast as you can and you slowly start understanding what’s going on. A lot of people in our crew went through that when we were in India and we kind of used that when we went to America, to Atlanta.

 Madhur:   Hotlanta [LAUGHTER]. Ya’ll making a movie? It was fun we had a blast. Good times.

SURAJ:    Yes, very good times.

 Q:        So, I think you both portrayed such a wide range of emotions throughout the movie and I’m wondering if you had past experiences that you drew on to help develop those?

SURAJ:    Definitely. Firstly the fact that we were doing this in itself, it was like a parallel to what was going on, because we had to learn really quickly and then perform something that we have never done before and be good at the same thing. Then also with Madhur obviously, with Slum Dog Millionaire and in life where you’re suddenly nobody’s and then you’re thrown and you’re supposed to be something. It affects you very strongly. Yes. Pulling from your own past experiences, at end of the day it’s the experience that’s the strongest and the closest.

You end up using all these resources, your own experiences, those of Rinku and Dinesh, just to try to get an idea or sense of what they would feel like- and it was worse for them, because they didn’t know the language.

MADHUR:   For Rinku and Dinesh it was much harder. So you try to use whatever you can and it’ll never get up to the level that they felt it, but, it allows you to get an essence and then build from there.

Q:        With the flamingo pitch, is that something that Rinku actually did?

SURAJ:    Yes, they actually did that.

MADHUR:   Rinku actually did that. The thing is Rinku and Dinesh were both javelin throwers, so the initial stance for javelin throwing is like that. Rinku automatically fell into that stance.

SURAJ:    Yes, Rinku is six feet, two inches tall and he was doing the flamingo.

Q:       Do either one of you like cricket?

SURAJ:    Madhur does.

MADHUR:   I do [LAUGHTER]. I do like cricket. Suraj is a soccer fan. But I’ve played cricket. Played for college and everything. 

Q:        How did you guys get into acting?

MADHUR:  They are very different stories for both of us. I have been in the business ever since I can remember. Before I was three I started with Michael Jackson and that’s how I got into the entertainment business as a Michael Jackson impersonator. When I was five my whole family, they shifted from Agra, where I was born, to Mumbai, just so I could pursue a career in the arts. I have just a really amazing supportive family. They struggled and really pushed for me. I always wanted to be an actor..to be in the movies. 

SURAJ:    For me, I never wanted to be an actor, or anything to do with film.  It was more of realization to some extent. My eyes were opened to the fact that, “Oh, wow! Look there is something here that actually I love a lot.” 

MADHUR:   It’s very liberating to be on a film set. As a child, I was very shy; a complete introvert. Not the kind of person I am today at all. I remember that I wouldn’t be able to answer questions people asked, or very communicative, but when I was on stage I was a different person. That’s when I felt the most confident and the most alive. I felt that this is where I belong and this is what I’m meant to do. This is where I’m meant to be. And I’m sure Suraj feels the same way.

SURAJ:   I feel the same way. You’re surrounded by so many weirdos who are trying to make something out of nothing and I love that. They are full of passion. By weirdos, I mean it in a very positive way [LAUGHTER].Insanity is legal on a film set.

MADHUR:   You need it.

SURAJ:   You’d be crazy to want to work on a film or movies. The hours, the amount your working; the amount you have to give to it.

MADHUR:   The amount of creative egos at work at the same spot.

 SURAJ:    You need to be crazy. I feel very much at home in that situation.

MADHUR:   Also, I think it’s one of those businesses where you accept people from all walks of life. It’s just a tremendous spectrum of people from different cultures who look different come together creating art. That’s awesome.

See Suraj Sharma as Rinku Singh and Madhur Mittal as Dinesh Pattel in Million Dollar Arm. It’s in theaters everywhere now!