Actor Dimple Kapadia is still recovering from her awestruck
reverie of working in Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’, the espionage thriller that is due to release on December 3 in India.

Kapadia, a veteran of Indian film cinema, has a part in
Nolan’s film, which was filmed in Mumbai when the film crew descended in
the financial capital of the country for a five-day shoot.

“Honestly, I was under so much pressure of my own while
doing it. I was so tense that I couldn’t really appreciate or enjoy what was
going on. If I think about it now, it was a beautiful dream for me,” Kapadia
told PTI in a telephonic interview from Mumbai.

“I think doing ‘Tenet’ has really changed my life. I was
always a reluctant actor. I kept putting things off and not doing them. But
‘Tenet’ has really changed that for me. I’m raring to go now. I want to do a
lot of work now, good work.” Kapadia, who played the role of an arms
dealer Priya Singh in the movie, said Nolan made things easy for actors.

She said she was staggered when she first read the script by
the auteur, and it took a while to sink into her what Nolan wanted to say with it.

She said she spent four hours reading the script and
wondered how Nolan would translate it into celluloid.  

“Even after
finishing it, I got the gist of it but still couldn’t fathom what he was trying
to exactly say. So I was really looking forward to seeing how he’s going to
translate it all into cinema as that would be the exciting part of it,” she
said.

Kapadia, 63, made her a debut in the early 1970s with
blockbuster ‘Bobby’ opposite the then heartthrob Rajesh Khanna. She went on to
star in many other hits, including ‘Saagar’, ‘Janbaaz’, and more recently ‘Dil
Chahta Hai’, ‘Being Cyrus’, and ‘Cocktail’.

She related an incident involving her rendering of a two-line
voiceover in the film, the importance of which she later realised. The next day
when she approached Nolan with a request of wanting to re-do it, Nolan’s
cool response affirmed her impression of him that how much in control he was of
his material.

 “’No. I was
convinced’,” she recalled him saying.

“So that’s his process. He’s got it all in his head and what
you need to do is to just appear and do your best because it is already all
there in his mind, how he sees it all and he wants it to be done,” she
said.

The filming of movie took place all over Europe, including
in Mumbai at locations like Breach Candy Hospital, Cafe Mondegar, Colaba Causeway,
Colaba Market, Gateway of India, Grant Road, Royal Bombay Yacht Club, and the
Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.

“It was all so fabulous. Suddenly, I felt like I was
the Maharani of India and the guests have come and it is my duty to take care
for them, make India proud and show them what all was good about the country.
It was a wonderful feeling,” Kapadia told PTI.

It was also shot in Estonia, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Norway, the
UK and the US.

The actress insists that ‘Tenet’ should be watched on big
screen, but at the same time drops a word of caution considering the pandemic, and requested “people should take complete care”.

“I have to see it three times more to completely
understand. I have seen it once, I have read the script and have worked in it,
but I still need to see it three more times or maybe four times to finally
understand what it was,” she signed off.