Neil Nitin Mukesh is the first mainstream hero to have done a scene of masturbation in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Jail. Reliving the highly unconventional moments of on-screen realism Neil says, “Frankly if it was some other director I’d have said no. But knowing the way Madhur depicts explicit sexual scenes I said yes. We shot the masturbation sequence with 450 other actors on the set with me. All the other inmates are asleep when I do it. Now a lot of it has been cropped off. But we still see the character doing it. There’s just a suggestion of it now.”
A portion of the sequence was voluntarily removed from the film before it was presented to the censor board. Says Neil, “Honestly, after Madhur and I shot the masturbation sequence we found we had gone too far. It was too explicit. It was just not jelling with Indian concepts of aesthetics. So we decided to knock it off quite a bit by mutual consent. We just wondered if the flow of the narration would be hampered.” Read more….
