India's coolest man at Cannes, Irrfan Khan, has a major role in sensational new-wave director Michael Winterbottom's film, A Mighty Heart. The film, based on Mariane Pearl's memoir of the same name about her late husband Daniel Pearl, stars Oscar-winning megastar Angelina Jolie in the lead.

After winning great plaudits for disarmingly natural work in both The Namesake and Life In A Metro, Khan himself discusses the pleasures of working with Winterbottom, and what he learnt from Angelina Jolie:

It's a pleasure to work with an actor who's competent. Then your load becomes less, you become more easy with yourself. Otherwise, you have to pretend that somebody's behaving this way.

You can see it in their eyes if somebody's really there or pretending, and that can really put you off. If a good actor is there, you just have to react.

In that way, Angelina Jolie is amazing.

Images: Irrfan, Jolie and a Mighty Heart

We used to do the whole scene in one take, half an hour takes. And that was normal, on that set.

So I remember once we were talking and I was supposed to take leave from her, and the way I was playing it as more of a formal thing. And in one take, I just happened to be a little informal, and she was reacting exactly to me. Incredible!

There was nothing planned. You normally plan your character, but when you are in front of the camera, you must have the courage to leave yourself. The performance needs to be more fluid. In drama school, you learn to analyse every thing, but in cinema�

I just wanted to learn from Angelina how to leave myself and see what happens. So she was fabulous, because she completely let go.

And we were doing such long takes. We don't normally do such long takes in film, it's almost like a play. But we weren't doing it for the audience, we were doing it for each other, and that's what made the difference.

In the play you have to reach out to the audience, project and indicate what's going on in your head, but on camera you don't have to indicate, you can be what you are and the director devises a way.

And the improvisation. Wow! Michael Winterbottom was completely open to change, in terms of performance, lines. We could change the script so long as we said what we needed to! No restrictions, no marks!

It was incredible to see a director trusting his team so much, and you rise to that trust as an actor. You have to justify the faith this man has in you.

As told to Raja Sen