In our latest Inside A Scene, Shoojit Sircar takes us behind the making of the 'knife scene' in Piku. The scene, starring Amitabh Bachchan, Deepika Padukone and Irrfan, is the one where the three of them are on the road and a knife is found in the boot of the car causing all hell to break loose. This scene was added later to the script as Sircar felt that the film needed a moment when everything came to a full stop.
This was also the brief that Sircar gave Irrfan and Bachchan when after a number of takes the scene was still not flowing well. He asked them to imagine it as the end of the film and to improvise on it, confident that his actors would take it to the next level. Sircar had always believed Bachchan to be a rehearsed actor who goes by the script, but that changed after this scene was shot. There was no end to the bickering between Bhaskor and Rana.
The only brief given to Padukone was to throw the knife at some point when the argument went too far. But this was not told to the other two actors taking them by genuine surprise when she chucked it. Though this scene was not intended to be the interval point when it was shot, when Shekhar Prajapati, the editor of Piku, suggested this to Sircar, it seemed like the right thing to do.