Jason Shah, who played the villainous British officer Cartwright in ‘Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar’, spoke about the differences in opinion that he had with some of the creative decisions that were made during the shoot. He confessed that series creator and filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali didn’t direct many of his scenes and said that he would have loved to have had more of a say in how his character was presented in the show.
Appearing on the ‘Inside the Mind with Rushabh’ podcast, Jason revealed that he raised his concerns, but that if he’d registered more complaints, he would have been labelled a ‘problem maker’. Asked why he felt dissatisfied, Jason explained, “It was his first time doing a web series. A film is a little different because the web is a little stretched, you’ve got a lot of episodes to make and it’s not made in a short time. He also wasn’t directing that much. I had other directors with me. I just felt we could’ve worked on it a little more and a lot more colour could’ve come out. It had the capacity, I feel.”
Jason said that there was a ‘lack of communication’ on set, as opposed to there being ‘miscommunication’. He said that he could’ve done more with Cartwright had he been given more freedom. “What didn’t happen was the depth of the character. If you look at Gandhi, with Ben Kingsley, they really show how far racism can go and the dichotomy between who someone thinks they are and another human being.”