The Dharker Side: An Audience with Queen Jamillia

"The other person I found surprising was [Producer] Rick McCallum. It's not often that you meet a producer that understands what the director is trying to do, and supports him creatively, someone who doesn't just think about the money. It's a very unusual way of making a film, and he has a very personal involvement with it, which I like. I'm used to producers just being men in suits and money people who don't really understand what's going on. He's very, very clued in."

Dharker's film career began with international acclaim. As a little girl of nine, she was the title character in Manika, Un Vie Plus Tard, playing a child convinced she had experienced past lives. Dharker notes that her upbringing conditioned her for this role. "Most of my friends at nine where about 40!" she laughs. "They were all my parents' friends and they were so interesting and generous, because they'd sit and talk to you. Manika was a nine-year old that really honestly believed she was 30. That couldn't have been more true of me, because I honestly thought that I was 30 years old and that I could converse with these directors and architects and creative people perfectly seriously. They would keep their faces straight when I was talking to them, so I got away with it."

Despite the accolades and attention of starring in a film at nine, Dharker wasn't convinced being a screen actor was her calling. "I had seen a lot of old cinema with Ingrid Bergman and Eva Gardner, and I thought that this magical alchemy happened when somebody pointed a camera at you. Suddenly, you became this incredibly beautiful creature. When I was ten, I went to France, and they had these pictures of my face all the way down the Champs-Elysées, and I remember thinking what an awful photograph it was. I went to the auditorium and it was the most harrowing two hours of my life, because I suddenly realized that you do not turn into this magical nymph when the camera looks at you. You just look like a funny child. That was a huge blow, and I didn't think that acting was a proper job at all."

Nonetheless, she persevered, and continued appearing in a number of roles in films in India and abroad, films like City of Joy, Split Wide Open and The Mystic Masseur. She performed on stage ("I love theatre. I think it keeps you awake; it keeps you alive," she says) and television ("Arabian Nights" and also a soap opera called "A Mouthful of Sky" which she describes as "crashingly bad, but great fun.")

"The roles kept turning up, and it was fun to jump into. Eventually, it just took over. When The Terrorist came out, I left to go to one film festival in 1998, and haven't gone back home since," she says.

Star Wars, though, is its own unique experience incomparable to other roles. "The nice thing about being in Star Wars is that suddenly, you have all these little kids coming up to you. I've heard these crazy stories where I have these two little cousins in America. They've been telling their schoolmates that their cousin is in Star Wars. Nobody believed them, but then, everybody went off and saw the film, and now these two little kids -- who are 9 and 12 -- are signing autographs in their school! I'm really tickled by it, but I won't let it go to my head."

Dharker has resisted the commercial allure of the Bollywood scene, instead sticking to her smaller independent roots. The pulpy musical genre, not known for weighty subject matter, is broadening in appeal, but Dharker notes that the international face of Indian filmmaking is diversifying.

"I remember in the 80s, all my dad's friends that were filmmakers always got funding to make their films, but they never got distribution, because no distributor would touch an independent film, especially in India," she says. "Suddenly distributors woke up to the fact that people did want to watch these films, they had a huge market, and they were made for very little money. The landscape of Indian cinema changed completely in my lifetime. Suddenly, it became cool to be an independent filmmaker. 'Art' used to be a bad word, because it meant no money. Now, you've got all these Bollywood people trying to steal our stories, steal our cinematographers, steal our directors, and I'm sitting back asking, 'Hey, where were you guys when you thought we were awful?'"

Though Dharker has been critical of the Bollywood clichés, she won't discount the genre completely. "I can't say that I'll never do a Bollywood film, because now, a lot of the directors are making very interesting stories," she admits. This past summer, she even played the role of an evil Bollywood actress in a London stage production of Bombay Dreams. "I've always said I'd love to play a Bollywood actress, especially the sort of slimy ones. I got my chance to do it."

At 25 years old, Dharker keeps her future plans flexible, refusing to be pigeon-holed into specific types of roles or genres. Her thoughts of career are pragmatic. "I don't think there's any point in speculating where I'll be in ten years," she says. "If you've worked in this business since you were a kid, one of the things you know is that a lot of it is luck. All you can do is be as good as you can possibly be, and go onto the next job."

As advice to actors struggling out in the field, she offers, "Enjoy your work and choose carefully. Choose for the right reasons. Sometimes, it has been very tempting in the past to choose films for the money. If you choose something you believe in, and do it with as much conviction as you can, then you cannot go wrong, even if no one sees the film. Those are the films that end up in the trailers of people like Samuel L. Jackson."