A MIGHTY HEART FELT REAL TO ACTORS

A Mighty Heart was shot documentary style so the actors could feel like they were living what happened.

A Mighty Heart directed by Michael Winterbottom was shot in sequence, almost like a documentary so the actors felt like they were really living the lives of their characters.

Irrfan Khan, who played the head Pakistani detective Captain and Archie Punjabi, the Indian born actress who plays the journalist Asra never felt like they were making a film, but actually searching for Daniel Pearl.

“I think we really also got so into our characters that we really started to believe that we are on this mission to find Daniel Pearl. And we really got quite frustrated when all the leads turned out to be false. Sometimes we’d even talk about it off camera. We never really spoke about as characters or actors what actually happened to Daniel Pearl. I think we all felt quite emotional discussing it. We never knew how we were going to react to each other because we had the script but we had to improvise. On one occasion he shouted at me but that was not in the script. You just never knew what was gonna happen but I think that’s what makes the film so real.”

A Mighty Heart was shot on location in Pakistan on the same streets and the restaurants that Daniel Pearl went to while investigating his story for the Wall Street Journal. All the actors including Angelina Jolie spent all their time together in the location doubling as Mariane Pearl’s house filmed in India which Archie says made the film even more real.

“I think it was good for the project because that’s what happened. People stayed in one house for four weeks. On set there was no trailer so you could never really escape. You could never become an actor, go into your trailer, talk about your next job to your agent. You were constantly with everybody else including Angelina, all of us in one room working together. That really helped for the film. I don’t think anybody was really telling jokes. Because everybody, all the actors, all the crew members it was something at the back of your head that you are dealing with something which is something that really happened.”

A Mighty Heart opens today in theaters.